ISSUE NO: 3/April-2011 ISSN: 0976-1608
The International Journal
Of
Culture, Literature and Criticism
Editor Dr. Jyotsna Sinha
Faculty of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India ISSUE NO: 3/April-2011 ISSN: 0976-1608
The International Journal
Of
Culture, Literature and Criticism
Editor Dr. Jyotsna Sinha
Faculty of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India The International Journal of Culture, Literature and Criticism
Editorial Board
Editor: Eucharia Donnery, Dr. Jyotsna Sinha, Lecturer, Center for the Teaching of Foreign Assistant Professor, Languages in General Education, Department of Sophia University, Humanities and Social Tokyo 102-8554 Sciences, MNNIT, Allahabad. Annual Subscription Rates: India: Rs. 250 (Individualby M.O.) Rs. 500 (Institutions by D.D.) Guest Editor : Overseas: $20 (Individuals) $25 (Institutions) Dr. Niroj Banerji MNNIT, Allahabad. Editorial Correspondence: Dr. Jyotsna Sinha, Dr Bashabi Fraser Assistant Professor, Lecturer in English Department of Humanities and Social and Creative Writing Sciences, School of Arts & Motilal Nehru National Institute of Creative Industries Technology, Edinburgh Napier Allahabad-211004. University Email: [email protected] Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
The views expressed by authors are their own and the Editor is not responsible for any controversy arising out of it. The International Journal of Culture, Literature and Criticism is an open forum for discussing various issues relating to culture, literature &criticism .Thought- provoking articles conforming to MLA style sheet are welcome. Unused material can be returned only when accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Editor‟s Note
The overwhelming response I have received for the present issue has encouraged me to add Book Reviews and Creative Writings for my next issue. I hope the readers will appreciate the new perspective thus given to the Journal which continues to enjoy vast readership in India and abroad. This time again we have a variety of articles ranging from Jewett‘s ‗A White Heron‘, passing through the mystic minstrels of Bengal, to the present views on Kalam, diaspora and Arvind Adiga. My heartfelt gratitude to all my colleagues, well-wishers, advisors and friends without whose support the timely publication of this issue would not have been possible. I thank all my readers and scholars for their incessant effort in contributing the papers thereby investing faith in me. Thank You & Happy Reading
Dr Jyotsna Sinha Notes on Contributors
1. Ms Amita Mishra Dubey is a research scholar in the Department of English and Modern European Languages at Allahabad University and completing her Thesis under Prof. Smita Agarwal. 2. Dr Anup Kumar Dey is working as Assistant Professor in the Department of English in Assam University. 3. Dr Archana Parashar is a Lecturer at SGSITS, Indore. Her specialization is in American Literature. She also has passion for Indian Writing in English and Subaltern Studies. Presently she is engaged in teaching Communication Skills to the Engineering Students.
4. Ms Basudhara Roy was awarded the gold medal for securing the highest marks in M.A (English), certificate of Merit and the Ishwari Dutta Memorial Award for securing the highest marks in B.A. (Hons.). She holds a Diploma in French (P.G. Diploma) from the Faculty of Foreign Languages (B.H.U.) with distinction and currently working as Lecturer in the Department of English at Karim City College, Jamshedpur.
5. Dr Chhaya Malviya is presently working as Coordinator in the English Department of Nehru Gram Bharti University, Allahabad. She also holds a degree of Acharya in Sanskrit and a degree of Prabhaker in Music (Vocal).
6. Dr M.Gouri is presently working as a Guest Faculty in the Department of English at Jamhedpur Women‘s College. She is teaching undergraduate and post graduate students.
7. Ms Jaya Singh is a research scholar in the Department of English and Modern European Languages, Allahabad University.
8. Dr Kalikinkar Pattanayak is presently working as Reader in the P.G. Dept. of English, Khallikote College, Berhampur Orissa.
9. Dr. Omana Antony is currently working as Assistant Professor, at Lingaya‘s University Faridabad.
10. Dr Pankaja Acharya is working as Assistant Professor Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Govt. Arts & Commerce College Indore. 11. Ms Sanchita Choudhury is a research Scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Kharagpur completing her thesis under Prof. Anjali Gera Roy.
12. Ms Shamenaz is presently teaching as a Sr. Lecturer and Head of Dept of Professional Communication, AIET, Allahabad. She is also pursuing D.Phil in English Literature from the University of Allahabad under the guidance of Prof Sumita Parmar. She has attended many National and International Seminars and holding the Membership of AESI, ELTAI, EACLALS, CWDS (A.U.), CLAI, IASA, USACLALS and AASRN.
13. Ms Shaista Maseeh is a research scholar from the University of Allahabad, pursuing research on Black Feminism, under the supervision of Prof. Sumita Parmar.
14. Ms Suruchi Dubey is working as Lecturer at Krishna Girls Engineering College, Kanpur.
15. Ms Vijeta Gautam is a research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad.
-----
Contents
1. An Analysis of Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Ms. Amita Mishra Kalam‘s works (writings and (Dubey) speeches) as a Work of Literature 2. Identity Crisis and Arthur Miller‘s Dr. Anup Kumar Dey & protagonist in After the Fall : Dr. Dipendu Das A Study in the Light of Erikson and Maslow 3. Jewett‘s World of Nature in Dr. Archana Parashar “A White Heron” 4. Stifled Voices in Diaspora Spaces: Ms. Basudhara Roy The Stereotype and the Housewife, a Study in Cultural Dislocation 5. Female Character as Career Dr. Chhaya Malviya Women in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande 6. Family Values in the Indian Dr. Omana Antony Diaspora : A Study of Meena Alexander‘s ―Manhattan Music‖ 7. Reconstructing Motherhood in the Dr. Gouri Mandapaka fictional works of Anita Desai : A postmodern analysis 8. Marginalization: Various Ms. Jaya Singh Approaches 9. The Fictional Representation of Dr. Kalikinkar Naked Reality: A Reading of Pattanayak Midnight‟s Children and The White Tiger 10. Cultural Consciousness in Dr. Pankaja Acharya Vidiadhar Suraj Prasad Naipaul‘s ―An Area of Darkness‖ 11. Bāuls:The Mystic Minstrels of Ms. Sanchita Bengal- Building a New Tomorrow Chaudhary In the Realm of Music 12. Neither ‗White‘ nor ‗Male‘: Black Ms. Shaista Maseeh Women and Black Feminism 13. Marriage in Troubled Waters: Ms. Shamenaz Shashi Deshpande‘s Roots and Shadows, The Dark Holds No Terror and That Long Silence 14. The Teaching of English in India : Ms. Suruchi Dubey Society and Change 15. From Divided Selves to an Ms. Vijeta Gautam & Integrated Self: Joan in Atwood‘s Dr. Jyotsna Sinha Lady Oracle
AN ANALYSIS OF DR. A.P.J. ABDUL KALAM‟S WORKS (WRITINGS AND SPEECHES) AS A WORK OF LITERATURE
Amita Mishra (Dubey)
―Literature consists of all the books where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity and attention of form‖. (qtd. in Goodman 3) Literature is like a recipe made of common ingredients but served in such an artistic and mouth watering manner that one cannot resist oneself to taste it. It gets its material from common human beings and the daily occurrences of their life, but it is the caliber and art of the writer that makes it worthy to be considered by all who care to read it. If used by a writer of high moral virtues and literary skill literature has the power to mould characters. Literature may be considered a collection of the best of thoughts. While literature consists of strong thoughts, it needs a complimentary form to convey these thoughts to its readers. Kalam is a great thinker and he has his own way of doing this. Although he is basically a scientist and not a man of letters he has the potential to convey his thoughts to his readers and audience. In Wings of Fire he invokes the young generation of India to draw from all the knowledge he possesses and to spread the grace of God everywhere: I am a well in this great land Looking at its millions boys and girls To draw from me The inexhaustible divinity And spread His grace everywhere As does the water drawn from a well. (177) Although born in a less educated family Kalam, found fame as a defence scientist. He has been honoured by India‘s biggest honour ‗Bharat Ratna‘ in 1997 and taken pledge as the twelfth President of India on 25th July 2002. He has given a new life and energy to the research centre of Indian Defence Programme. He is like a candle burning in the dark to show the right path to people, that have been mislead. He faced lot of sorrows in his life but his quest never dwindled. Besides being a great scientist and teacher he is a great writer also. His books are like the ‗Sangam‘ from where a person comes out pure after taking a dip in the holy Ganga: he clears one‘s thought and soul. Kalam has written several books: Wings of Fire, Ignited Minds, India Vision 2020, Indomitable Spirit, Guiding Souls, Inspiring Thoughts, Children Ask Kalam, Mission India, The Life Tree, The Luminous Sparks, Developments in Fluid Mechanics and Space Technology, My Journey, and Envisioning an Empowered Nations. Although he accepts that he is ―only a man of technology‖, in his books as well as in his speeches he has dealt with several issues that reveal his intellect and its thinking process. Kalam is called as a ‗Missile man‘ and a ‗scientist-philosopher‘. He has not only made missiles to take off from the launch pad but has pierced the sky with his speeches and poems like missiles which directly touch their goal that is the heart and mind of the audience and the reader. Although Kalam is not a writer by profession and most of his literary works have been co-authored by others, the thoughts expressed have originated in Kalam‘s mind and heart. Moreover, Kalam has talked and given extensive interviews to these authors, who have, in effect, been excellent stenographer, transcribing Kalam‘s complex thoughts into the written word. It is quite understandable that his duties as India‘s leading scientist and later on, the President, did not allow Kalam to have the leisure of writing by his own hand. It is only through his speeches and few poems originally written by him that he comes directly in contact with his audience. Most of his books are either result of running commentary by Kalam, which is then typed and saved in writing by his co-authors. Still, one can have a glimpse of his style and attitude in these books. His books deal with his ideas to achieve the aim of a developed India by two thousand twenty. Where, on the one hand, these are outcome of an objective mind often a subjective heart clings to these ideas. One can find a nice blending of subjectivity and objectivity in his writings. The first and foremost question that arises during the study of his writings is whether these could be considered as literature or not? Literature in its comprehensive sense ―includes all the activities of human soul in general, or within a particular period, country or language and therefore embraces all manner of composition in prose and verse, scientific or purely literary, set down in writing or communicated by word of mouth‖. (qtd. In Goodman 4) On the other hand, in the restricted sense literature is: …that class of writing which aims at rousing the feelings of the beauty by the perfection of form or excellence of ideas or by both… Under literature, when used in its narrower meaning, we should include only such works, as, by reason of their subject-matter or the artistic way in which they are handled, are of general human interest and awaken in us one or more of the pleasurable feelings of the beautiful, the sublime, the pathetic or the ludicrous. (qtd. In Goodman 3) Being a student of literature, I am dealing with this genius only in the restricted and ordinary meaning of literature: its content and form. Kalam, in most of his books, talks about the manufacturing of missiles, hovercrafts, etc. which are subjects of science. But it does not mean that he has dedicated a whole book to this topic rather he talks about these things as a part of his professional life and often these are parts of his interactions and conversations which he has included in his books. While the chief feature of science is its objective outlook and it has to do with things, literature tends to be subjective and deals with the writer‘s inner most thoughts. William J. Long in English Literature, talks of the the main qualities of literature: artistic quality, suggestiveness, permanence. Talking about the artistic quality of literature he says: ….the first significant thing is the essentially artistic quality of all literature. All art is the expression of life in forms of truth and beauty; or rather it is the reflection of same truth and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought to our attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the delicate curves of the shell reflect sound and harmonies too faint to be otherwise noticed. (qtd. in Goodman 6) Kalam is a great lover of flora and fauna and considers nature as His abode. According to him, only by serving the natural objects one can reach God. His poem ―Whispers of Jasmine‖ is a good example of his love for nature. He personifies the Jasmine creeper which has fallen by the wayside to show the blessings of nature for human beings: Whispers from Creepers touch my soul, Halting, my gait caring to listen Toddler bud talking to mother: Why should we blossom asks that bud Plucked and treated shabbily by humans Hearing the child laughed the mother Laughed and laughed and laughed: Look, my child, why do birds sing, See that lawn, peacocks dancing, Jumping deer dancing to winds, Water birds washing their feathers As they go gliding fashionably on water – All these beauties adding to scene. Joyous nature‘s bounteous ways Enable humans to listen to their heart. But for nature hearts harden, Wickedness permeates even the souls, ‘Tis God‘s will gladden thy soul. Blossom we will, blossom we will Cheer up, dear bud, blossom we will! (The Life Tree 78-80) Another quality of literature is ‗suggestiveness‘, which according to W.J. Long, ―appeals to our emotions and imagination rather than to our intellect‖. Kalam often during his addressess and writings makes people to think and reply his questions. When Kalam in address at the Inauguration of National Youth Conference at Suttur in Mysore on 15th of October, 2004, asks to his audience: ―Can we allow the situation to continue in which millions of children are forced into lifelong poverty?‖ he is actually letting his audience to think and imagine about the future of the younger generation. The third characteristic which, according to Long, arises from the previous two is literature‘s ―permanence‖. A writer infuses artistic quality into the material available to him in his age and provides it the suggestiveness, which makes it universal, easily graspable for the reader belonging to any age. Universality in literature demands the widest human emotion. Kalam deals with indomitable spirit, ignited minds, and a knowledge society, which are subjects of universal value and no line of control can resist these to surpass the level of universality. While he talks about the issues of highest human interest, his struggle to get higher education, the portrayal of his mother reveal his emotions, which although they are personal, are able to attract reader of any nation or any age. Another touchstone to analyze Kalam‘s writing is in the context of society. According to W.R.Goodman, ―A literary man is as much a product of his society as his art is product of his own reaction to life. Even the greatest artists are sometimes a conscious exponent of his time-spirit.‖ (Goodman 12) Kalam is a great ationalist. Although there is no struggle for freedom going on in his age but he lived his childhood in such a time when the struggle of India to achieve freedom was at its peak: Nehru‘s speech ‗the tryst with destiny‘ still wrings his heart. Apart from this, he is living in the age when India is trying to establish herself as a developed country in the world scenario. His books often deal with the subject of a developed India. In his books he often talks about missiles, aircrafts, technology, communalism, which are burning issues of his times. Although Kalam could be considered as product of his age he has tried to give a new shape to his society. According to Goodman: The essence of literature lies in the individual approach of the author, his personality which will dominate over other influences. Undoubtedly, the author is shaped by the spirit of his age, but he has also got the capabilities to mould his period. A great man of letters is the creation as well as the creator of his age in which he exists. (13) Kalam, an inhabitant of the age of science and technology, urges people to know the real purpose of life. In this age when man is running after material comforts, he invokes people towards the journey to the region of the metaphysical and for their convenience he gives them the liberty to blend the desire of materialistic pleasures with the metaphysical one. He emphasizes the importance of moral values for the evolution of a better person and so, to a better and ignited nation which in the final stage will result in an ignited world. According to De Quincy, ―there is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach, the function of the second is to move.‖ (qtd. in Goodman 5). Kalam decided to have his autobiography published as through it he would be able to tell the story of the technical growth and technological advancement in India. He invokes Indians to be technically sound as this is an era of technology. His Ignited Minds begins with his oft quoted lines: ―Dream, Dream, Dream, /Dreams transform into thoughts /And thoughts result in action.‖ (1) This encourages one to dream high and dream big. While on the one hand, he gives the information of ancient India which excelled in the field of education, and on the other, he encourages the young in India to make India a knowledge society. Through the narration of his struggle to obtain higher education, and, the problem that arose in the testing of the missile ‗Agni‘, he conveys the message of slow and steady wins the race. His books are loaded with the missiles of optimism with which he can destroy any barrier coming in the way of the vision of a developed India by two thousand twenty. Let us examine the writings of Kalam from the perspective of the aesthetic theory of Art for Art‘s sake. The purpose of literature is often divided in two parts: for art‘s sake and art for life‘s sake. As Kalam is not a professional writer, there is little scope for his writings to exhibit the traits of art for art‘s sake. He is basically a thinker. Kalam is a scientist stressing sound moral values in his personal as well as social life. He even considers it good for the future of the world. Like Aristotle, Kalam also considers this world as an imitation of the inner world that is permanent. On the other hand, according to Sidney, ―the poet delights and teaches. The poet teaches by presenting an ideal world for the imitation of the reader.‖(qtd. in Goodman 48) Kalam in his books and speeches often talked about his utopia of ‗the knowledge society‘ where everything will be based on interconnection and interdependence. Matthew Arnold, the great critic of the Victorian era, considers poetry as a criticism of life, which teaches people how to live. Kalam abhors and reveals the corruption prevailing in his time. He creates the picture of the knowledge society of his dreams and puts it side by side with the present-day society to show their differences. Apart from this, he urges educational institutes to provide students moral education together with their regular education. Kalam starts his journey from a common man to family, to nation, to world and ends with the fulfillment of the purpose of life: the realization and achievement of the essence. Although Kalam has his own style of writing but he does not write keeping a form or style consciously in his mind. For him, form is utilitarian, a means of conveying his thoughts with which he wants to bring about a revival in his age. He fits in the criteria of Ruskin who says: ―All art is great and good and true only so far as it is distinctively the work of manhood in its entire and highest sense; that is to say, not the work of limb and fingers, but of the necessities, by the inferior powers, and therefore distinguished to essence from all products of the inferior powers upheld by the soul.‖ (qtd. in Goodman 51) Lastly, let us examine Kalam from the stand point of the theory, ―style is the man‖. According to Lamborn, ―To a poet in a lover‘s mood, the sea smiles with him in joy, the wind whispers the name of his beloved, the stars look down on him like friendly eyes. To the same poet sea looks grim and cruel, the winds mock his sighs, and the cold stars watch him with a passionless inscrutable gaze‖. (qtd. in Goodman 52) Every writer or poet is a unique personality gifted with a unique sense of perception. A writer can feel and reflect in the way a common man cannot even think about doing so. Literature, if considered a reflection of society, in actuality, reflects the style of the author, how he considers things and in what mood; the mood at the time of his interaction with a particular moment. It is very essential to know the personality of the writer to be acquainted with his writings. ―Ascertaining the relation of the writer to his work, there are two diametrical opposite views. Firstly, there is subjective or the personal view in the art. Secondly, there is objective and the impersonal outlook in art.‖ (qtd. in Goodman 54) A study of the writings of a writer shows his development of thought, the influences on him, and his life-style. According to Rutherford, ―just in proportion to the measure of individuality with which a man is gifted does his use of the language mould itself? To approach style in the way is to find in it not only the living product of an author‘s personality, but a transparent record of his intellectual, spiritual and artistic growth.‖ (qtd. in Goodman 54) Kalam, highly influenced by his religious mother and father and the religious atmosphere of his childhood town, Rameshwaram, is not able to erase the design carved by them on his child‘s mind. Although he is a scientist, accepts the sovereignty of religion. However, this was also the time when India was about to get her freedom and Indian society was overhauling its views regarding orthodox religion. The moral teaching of his parents and teachers made him a person of abiding values. His religious background and scientific education enables him to see compatibility between religion and science. According to Wordsworth: ―All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… by a man… who has also thought long and deeply… Our thoughts are the representatives of all our past feelings.‖ His famous statement, ―Poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility‖ also emphasizes the dominance of personality of the writer in his writings. Most of Kalam‘s books are result of his conversation with his co-authors with whom he shares his feelings and events that form his life. Thus we see, in the writings of Kalam there is decisive influence of the personal element. The second opinion about the writer‘s relation to his book is the objective or impersonal outlook. According to Goodman, ―It is absurd to hold that a writer, however original or great he may be, is entirely divorced from his surroundings and age. Every writer is the product of his age and environments to a certain extent. His works are a reflection of zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.‖ (57) Kalam is a scientist and objectivity is the base of science yet he tends to be subjective at times and gives his views on several issues. He has a mirror-like personality and he reflects on each and everything that comes in his contact without adding any artifice in to it. He often asks his audience to recite the lines written by him under the title ―Song of Youth‖: As a young citizen of India, Armed with technology, knowledge and love for my nation, I realize, small aim is a crime. I pray to the Almighty: May divine peace with beauty enter into our people; Happiness and good health blossom in Our bodies, minds and souls. (The Life Tree, 3) There are few odes which could be added to his objective writings: ‗The Life Tree‘ and ‗O Almighty, Light the Lamp of Knowledge‘ are two of these. In a way the writings of Kalam show the blending of personality with impersonality. While his writings prove him to be a product of his age, they also show the influence he has left on his age. According to Middleton Murray, a good style is a blend of personality and impersonality: ―For the highest style is that wherein lies the two current meanings of the word ‗blend‘, it is a combination of the maximum of personality with the maximum of impersonality; on the one hand, it is a concentration of peculiar and personal emotion, on the other, it is a complete projection of this personal emotion into the created thing‖ (qtd. in Goodman 60 – 61). So, the literature written by Kalam fits in the definition of literature; possessing artistic quality, suggestiveness and permanence. His writings reflect his society and try to purify the impurities in that society. These may be considered both, literature of knowledge and literature of power; while these give information, they also have the potential to mould the reader according to his desire. These are good examples of the nice blending of personality with impersonality and prove the dictum ―style is the man‖ (qtd. in Goodman 53) Works Cited: Goodman, W. R. Quintessence of Literary Essays. Delhi: Doaba House, 2002 Kalam, A. P. J. Abdul. The Life Tree. India: Vikings by Penguin Books India, 2005. ---. Ignited Minds. India: Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 2003. ---,Arun Tivari. Wings of Fire: an Autobiography. Hyderabad: Universities Press ( India ) Pvt. Ltd., 2004. References: Goodman,W.R. Practical Criticism. Delhi: Doaba House, 2008. Hornby ,A. S., ed. Jonathan Crowther. Oxford Advanced Learner‟s Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Mehta, V. R. ed. Nalini Pant. Political Science: Key Concepts and Theories. New Delhi: NCERT, 2003. Seturaman, V.S., C.T. Indra, T. Sriraman, ed. Practical Criticism. Chennai: Rajiv Beri for Macmillan India Ltd., 2007. Zohar, Danah, Ian Marshall. S Q: Spiritual Intelligence the Ultimate Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2001. http://www.abdulkalam.com.
-----
IDENTITY CRISIS AND ARTHUR MILLER‟S PROTAGONIST IN AFTER THE FALL: A STUDY IN THE LIGHT OF ERIKSON AND MASLOW
Dr Anup Kumar Dey & Dr Dipendu Das
One of America's most celebrated playwrights, Arthur Asher Miller was born in New York City on October 17, 1915 and was educated at the University of Michigan. Miller began his literary career at a period of social, moral and private turmoil. The occurrence of the World Wars and the Great Depression in the first half of the twentieth century were some of the events of far reaching consequences that left deep mark on the social, moral and private world of man that put several myths and realities under tremendous pressure. Placed under this pressure what is perceived was a fractured human relationship as well as displacement of principle for pragmatism leading to identity crisis which is extensively reflected in the twentieth century literature and theories. In Miller's plays, we come across characters those are in constant struggle for asserting their identities. But the irony lies here that on most occasions when his characters proclaim their identities they are in the act of betraying their selfhood. The echo of this is found in Incident at Vichy when a character remarks: ―It is the hallmark of the age – the less you exist the more important it is to make a clear impression.‖ (p.181). The essential need of his characters is always for an identity that can be held with a sense of pride. For Miller‘s protagonists, one‘s name and reputation is significantly indicative of one‘s character. It is the same need that impels Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman), Joe Keller (All My Sons), and Eddie Carbone (A View from the Bridge) to assert their identities at the cost of selfhood. It is again John Proctor (The Crucible) who would rather die than see his name destroyed. Unlike any other American dramatists, Arthur Miller wrote extensively about his works and in the theatre essays he talks ostensibly about the nature of tragedy as well as his characters. In these essays his prime concern is with the nature of man as a social being as well as the moral basis for individual and social action. In this regard C.W.E. Bigsby comments: ―His (Miller) characters frequently find themselves at the cutting edge of the devouring mechanization of the age, desperately trying to negotiate a basis for a moral life, fighting to create a space within which identity can cohere and will and imagination exert an influence apparently denied by biological and economic determinisms.‖ (Bigsby. p. 158). In All My Sons, Incident at Vichy and After the Fall this lead to abandonment of all sorts of moral and social responsibility for the sake of absolute individual authority. Again in Miller‘s world it is argued that if the individual is to be a moral agent, or if he has to be held responsible for his own choice and action, he has to be granted a degree of autonomy and social recognition. Unable to negotiate with the dichotomy, many of Miller‘s characters live in a world of failed dreams and simultaneously they want to twist the society to accommodate their dreams and meanings. This results in the crisis of identity as they start looking at themselves as victims and desperately try to adapt themselves with the situation given to them. In this regard Miller himself comments: ―I think in the plays of mine that I felt were of tragic dimensions, the characters are obsessed with retrieving a lost identity, meaning that they were displaced by the social pressure, the social mask, and no longer could find themselves, or are on the verge of not being able to.‖ (Steven R. Centola p.347). Some of his protagonists fail to achieve it and meet their catastrophic end trying to live with their ideal. When one interprets it from Eriksonian perspective (Boeree. Erik Erikson) it can be discerned that their development is either healthier or reverse and the identity crisis is resolved or intensified. Again when one approaches this aspect of Miller‘s protagonists by applying Maslow‘s methods (Boeree. Abraham Maslow) one can recognize that there are the effects of environment on the individual, in conjunction with psychological and social factors which result in the crisis of identity. Erik Erikson is the first theorist to truly link psychosocial growth with human development. A Danish- German American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erikson coined the term ‗identity crisis‘ and considered it as one of the major conflicts a human being faces in the course of his development. Erikson is considered as a Freudian ego-psychologist who was greatly influenced by Freud‘s works. He was also influenced by Alfred Adler and Karen Horney in their consideration of the impact of culture and society as important in understanding human development. His major contributions to psychological study include a re- appraisal of the ego and extended view of developmental stages conceived by Freud. Erikson opined that the ego Freud conceived was far more than which merely grows out of the id to maximize pleasure and minimize discomfort. He considered ego as a positive driving force in the development of personality whose chief function is to establish and maintain a sense of identity. Erikson defined identity as ―a subjective sense as well as an observable quality of personal sameness and continuity, paired with some belief in the sameness and continuity of some shared world image. As a quality of unself-conscious living, this can be gloriously obvious in a young person who has found himself as he has found his communality. In him we see emerge a unique unification of what is irreversibly given- that is, body type and temperament, giftedness and vulnerability, infantile models and acquired ideals- with the open choices provided in available roles, occupational possibilities, values offered, mentor‘s met, friendships made, and first sexual encounters. (Erikson, 1970) A person with a strong sense of identity knows his position and has workable goals for change and growth. This kind of person has a sense of uniqueness and also a sense of belonging and wholeness. Those who have weaker egos they get trapped in what is termed as identity crisis. According to Erikson an identity crisis occurs in a person‘s life when he lacks direction, feels unproductive and does not feel a strong sense of belonging. Erikson viewed that the emergence of an identity crisis occurs in a teenage years when one struggles between feelings of identity versus role confusion. He opined that only individuals who successfully resolve the crisis become ready to face future challenges in life. Erikson also maintained that the identity crisis may recur in any stages of human life as he goes on redefining himself with the changing demand of the age.
There are eight stages in Erikson‘s developmental model and each stage with two possible outcomes. Mikula points out that each stage presents a crisis that the individual must reconcile. Erikson viewed these points not as ―catastrophic hurdles‖ to be overcome but rather as ―turning points‖ in the individual‘s development. The more completely the individual addresses the crisis, the healthier his development will be. (Mikula, 2003, p.1) According to Erikson‘s Theory of Psychosocial Development, successful negotiation at each stage leads to healthy personality and vice versa. Favourable outcomes of each stage are known as ‗virtue‘. Erikson viewed that when an individual understands both extremes in a life-stage and accepts as both required and useful he can have the optimal virtue for that stage. In Childhood and Society (1950) Erikson presented his stages of psychosocial development: 1) Basic Trust versus Mistrust – Infant Stage. The strength or virtue sought at this stage is hope. 2) Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt – Toddler Stage. The virtue is will. 3) Initiative versus Guilt – Kindergarten. The virtue is purpose. 4) Industry versus Inferiority – School age, generally six to twelve years of age. The virtue is competence. 5) Identity versus Role Confusion – Teenage. The virtue is fidelity. 6) Intimacy versus Isolation – Young adult. The virtue is love. 7) Generativity versus Stagnation – the Mid-life crisis. The virtue is caring. 8) Ego Integrity versus Despair – Old age. The virtue is wisdom. The first four stages deal with the development of the child and the remaining four with the adolescent and adult years. Identity crisis in an individual; occurs first in the true sense of the term in stage five during which the individual integrates past experiences into new roles and also evaluates role models and starts questioning the conventions. The individual becomes more independent, and begins to visualize future in term of career, relationships, families etc. He also pointed out that at this stage an individual for the first time is faced with the sense of morality and begins developing an ego identity (Erikson, 1950, p.261). Role confusion is the most important concern that an individual faces in this stage. The adolescent struggles with the dichotomy of perceived role as a child by others and pressures to act like an adult. Erikson suggests ―psychological moratorium‖ during this stage when the adolescent freely tries new roles, experiments with new ideas and evaluates places and people. The successful negotiation of both the extremes by an individual at this stage gives the virtue of fidelity. This enables the adolescent to understand the world better and he accepts the standards of his culture and assimilates into society. In stage six of Erikson‘s psychosocial development the young adult is expected to form intimate relationships with others which is not primarily based on the individual‘s own roles, but rather on the shared roles. Successful negotiation leads to healthy relationships and a sense of commitment, safety and care in relationship. Inability to develop a sense of intimacy and commitment leads an individual into the sense of isolation, loneliness, depression and also ―distantiation‖ as called by Erikson. The result is ―the readiness to isolate and, if necessary, to destroy those forces and people whose essence seems dangerous to one‘s own, and whose ―territory‖ seems to encroach on the extent of one‘s intimate relationships.‖ (Erikson, 1950, p.264) The strength sought in this stage is love that includes love between romantic partners as well as for family members and others. According to Erikson, this love renders the ability to keep away individual differences and conflicts and grants harmony in the relationship between the partners. The conflicting poles of stage seven are Generativity versus stagnation. In this stage the individual develops a sense of being part of the bigger world. Boeree refers to it as the ―extension of love into the future‖ (Boeree, Erik Erikson, p. 10). Erikson considered Generativity as the central constituent of human development: ―. . . this term encompasses the evolutionary development which has made man the teaching and instituting as well as learning animal. The fashionable insistence on dramatizing the dependence of children on adults often blinds us to the dependence of the older generation on the younger one. Mature man needs to be needed, and maturity needs guidance as well as encouragement from what has been produced and must be taken care of.‖ (Erikson, 1950, p.266-67) Cross and Cross pointed out the physical and psychological changes occur to individual in this stage. The problem of aging brings new crisis in the life of the individual. The negative aspect of this stage is stagnation when the individual feels that he has contributed nothing to future generations and tends to withdraw from the society. Erikson points out: ―Individuals, then, often begin to indulge themselves as if they were their own – or one another‘s – one and only child, and when conditions favor it, early individualism, physical and psychological, becomes the vehicle of self-concern.‖ (Erikson, 1950, p.267) The virtue developed in this stage is care and it comprises care for the ideas and ideals in addition to the care for future generations. The final stage of Erikson‘s psychosocial development deals with integrity versus despair. It is a time when an individual experiences the slowing down of productivity, losing of loved ones and contemplates on the meaning of life and death. He has also to resolve the issues of unfulfilled ambitions, dreams and desires. The negative aspect of this stage is despair when an individual sees his life as unproductive, feels guilt about his past and becomes dissatisfied with his life which often leads him to depression, paranoia, hypochondria and spitefulness. The virtue of this stage is wisdom which renders the ability to approach death without fear or regret. Abraham Maslow‘s concept of human development is similar in design to Erikson‘s stages. He considered that on the development of individual the effect of environment has a role along with psychological factors. Based on this concept, Maslow developed his Hierarchy of Needs, a five-step pyramid that includes growth and development based on the successful appeasement of lower level needs. These needs begin with physiological demands and end in what Maslow calls self- actualization. The first level of the hierarchy is physiological needs as it stresses on basic human needs – air, water, food, shelter etc. The absence of these needs result in discomfort, pain, hunger etc. and the individual goes for immediate fulfillment of these needs. The second level of needs includes safety and security and these are surfaced once the basic first level needs are addressed properly. The third level of needs is love and it relates to the individual‘s desire to be accepted by others which include family, fellow workers or social contracts. Boeree refers to the susceptibility to loneliness and social anxiety as the motivator to develop social bonds. The fourth level is esteem needs and Maslow divided it into two levels: lower esteem needs focus on attainment of glory, recognition, attention, reputation etc. and higher esteem requires self-respect. Confidence, achievement, mastery and competence define success at this level. The potential danger in this level is low self-esteem and inferiority complexes. The fifth and the final level of pyramid is self-actualization. In this level the individual endeavors for the attainment of all that is likely, probable and thinkable. Maslow was of the view that only two percent of the world‘s population ever reaches this level. In his book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971) Maslow provides a roadmap to attain self-actualization : 1) Concentration: It refers to one‘s ability to focus on what is happening around him. 2) Growth Choices: It refers to individual‘s ability to make conscious and positive choices by taking risk of safety in encountering new and challenging experiments. 3) Self-awareness: It refers to individual‘s ability to understand its own need by being unmoved by the opinions of others. 4) Integrity: Honesty equals with integrity that includes taking responsibility for one‘s actions. 5) Judgment: It refers to individual‘s ability to make proper decisions by listening to one‘s inner feelings and instincts. 6) Never-ending Process: It refers to ―a way of continually living, working, and relating to the world rather that to a single accomplishment‖ (Fadiman & Frager, 2002, p.439) 7) Peak Experiences: Maslow referred these as ―transient moments of self- actualizations‖. Peak experiences make the individual more connected, alive and focused. These enable greater productivity by making them less conflicted. 8) Lack of Ego Defenses: This final component enables the individual to disable the defense when appropriate and not to distort self image or one‘s relationship with the world. A literary text often does not merely reflect or respond to the conflict, rather emerges out of it. In After the Fall (1964) the protagonist is an individual who stands before an invisible judge and pleads his case. As pointed out by the dramatist at the very outset of the play that ―the action takes place in the mind, thought and memory of Quentin‖. Reaching at a particular point of his life he is now in a position to glimpse back at his past and tries to achieve a balance between deeds and ends, affirmation and negation of responsibility and guilt. But he is in a fix whether to justify his acts or not. The play thus presents the crisis of Quentin; it is a ―trial of a man by his own conscience, his own values, his own deeds.‖ (Arthur Miller, “Forward to After the Fall, in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller.p.257) Quentin begins as an extremely fragmented individual with no specific identity of himself. In his process of looking back into his past he finds himself in his boyhood years when he experienced the trouble in the relationship between his parents. His mother prefers him to his elder brother Dan and this subsequently results in a kind of oedipal complex through out his life. In his process of contemplation on his acts and deeds he constantly feels the powerful presence of his mother in every crucial moment. As referred in the stage five of Erikson‘s developmental model Quentin was confronted with the dichotomy of having an identity and role confusion. The sacrifice of the prospect of a career by his elder brother for the sake of Quentin‘s education and his mother‘s acceptance of it puts him in transfix between the acceptance and negation of responsibility and guilt. The image of Dan extending his helping hands: ―This family‘s behind you. Quentin. Anytime you need anything . . .‖ (p.201) puts him before role confusion: ―No wonder. I can‘t find myself!‖ (p.201). Quentin fails to attain the virtue of fidelity in Eriksonian sense as he fails to integrate his past with his new role. His struggle with the dichotomy of perceived role as a child by his family members (he is always addressed as ‗Kid‘ by his father and Dan) and the pressures to act like an adult intensifies his role confusion. Identity crisis in Quentin is intensified when he reaches to the stage six of Erikson‘s psychosocial development as he fails to form a successful relationship with his first wife. His failure to strike out a balance in relationship between his wife and other women results in his inability to develop a sense of intimacy and commitment which leads him into the sense of isolation and recognition of guilt. Looking back into his past Quentin feels that he is separate from his family members, his friends Mickey and Lou and his wife Louise and an obsessive sense of loneliness seizes him. Quentin laments that the ―unseen web of connection between people is simply not there. And I always relied on it.‖ Again he fails to negotiate the dichotomy between his perceived image and actuality and the frequent appearance of Felice and her words: ―I‘ll always bless you‖ strikes a refrain against his own perception: ―I feel . . . unblessed‖. The guilt that he feels for his treatment with his family, for the unsuccessful marriages and for his reluctant attitude to help his friend in his distress further intensify his identity crisis. The conflicting poles of stage seven of Erikson‘s developmental model i.e. generativity versus stagnation lead Quentin to further crisis of identity. He fails to attain the ‗virtue‘ of this stage i.e. care as he struggles to develop a sense of being part of the bigger world. Furthermore, his attitude of transferring the responsibility: ―These goddamned women have injured me‖ has hindered his acceptance of his own culpability. He developed the negative aspect of this stage i.e. stagnation as he feels that he has contributed nothing and tends to withdraw from the society. This overwhelming feeling of stagnation again hinders in establishing a workable relationship with his second wife and ―he finds it difficult to regard his feeling for Maggie as anything but dishonest‖ (Neil Carson. p 117). Quentin in the final stage of Erikson‘s psychosocial development experiences the sense of despair as he contemplates on his past. He suffers from guilt consciousness but the final part of the play traces Quentin‘s ultimate overcoming of it as he shuns away his failures and goes on to start a new beginning of his life with Holga. In a sense he negotiates successfully between his ―Ego Integrity‖ and ―Despair‖ and attains wisdom which enables him to look at himself with a more profound sense and vision. Applying Abraham Maslow‘s concept of human development in analyzing Quentin‘s character one can trace the movement to the third level of needs where he desires to be accepted by his family, friends and his clients. The fourth level of needs in Quentin can be traced in his aspiration to attain glory, recognition, attention, reputation etc. both as a successful counsel as well as in the form of relation. As a legal adviser he is successful in giving comfort to Felice so much so that she is ready to ―bless‖ him anytime. His success as a counsel is further vindicated by Lou‘s preference for him over others in rescuing him from the allegation in the House Un- American Activities Committee and in rescuing Maggie from the clutches for her agents. But as a relation he considers himself a failure in the sense that he is unsuccessful as a family member as well as a husband in both his marriages and more importantly in keeping the confidence of his friend Lou. This has hindered his prospect to reach to the fifth and the final level of pyramid i.e. self-actualization. Quentin does not fulfill all the qualities required to attain the level of self- actualization. He lacks concentration as he fails to focus on what is happening around him. He fails to negotiate between his personal life and his professional life and it is evident in his two unsuccessful marriages as well as in his act of forgetting about a crucial meeting of his law firm where everybody was waiting for him. He also fails to make Growth Choices in his ability to make conscious and positive choices vis-a-vis his family and friend. The sterility in the relationship with his wife Louise is not only due to her suspicious nature but also due to his inability to recognize her as a separate person. Moreover, he suffers from indecision in making a choice between his friend Lou and his firm and the subsequent feeling of relief at the suicide of Lou presents him as a person of weak personality. Quentin also suffers from the crisis of identity as he fails to have Self-awareness and he is unable to negotiate between his own need and expectations of others. He also lacks Integrity as he fumbles in taking responsibility for his own actions although the ultimate recognition of it has happened too late and it has already taken away much from his life. Referring to Judgment, Quentin achieves it only at the fag end when he contemplates on his actions and regrets for his inability to take decisions by listening to his inner feelings and instincts. In the context of the last three requirements for reaching to the level of self- actualization Quentin lacks all these and thus fails to attain that level.
Works cited: 1. Bigsby, C.W.E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama. Vol.2. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 2004. 2. Boeree, G.D. Erik Erikson. 1902-1994. [webpage]. Shippenburg University.
------
JEWETT‟S WORLD OF NATURE IN “A WHITE HERON”
Archana Jewett
Jewett portrays the characters in her fiction as an individual who live in the harmony with the world of nature and who extols and joyfully experiences nature‘s magnificence. As the characters in her fiction seek to establish and maintain harmony with all creation, she sees every being, be it animate or inanimate, not as separate from herself, but as a part of the human family. Considering the facts mentioned above, one may rightly say that Jewett‘s ―A white Heron‖ reflects the symbiosis of nature and culture. It is, in fact, an expression of Jewett‘s concern over the rapid erosion of their environment and culture by the twin evils of industrialization and urbanization ushered in by the rise of new American spirit in the name of modernization and civilization. Acutely aware, that damage to their environment is synonymous with damage to the culture. Though ―A White Heron‖ has been among Sarah Orne Jewett‘s most admired stories since its publication in 1886, its richness and strength may appear even greater today in the light of an eco- narrative.. This tale of nine-year old Sylvia‘s encounter with a young male ornithologist reverberates with meaning for such issues as the socialization of girls, the balance of power between the sexes, and the need for woman to be true to her nature. In the heroine‘s conflict over revealing the heron to the young man, the story also concerns the need for man-kind to resist the erosion of our integrity with the natural world. This lonely country child (p.171)1 Jewett named Sylvia in reference to the girl‘s affinity for the forest. Like little Sarah and Little Nan, ―this little woods-girl is at home among the trees and animal life of the ―New England wilderness‖ (p.164)2. Describing herself as a child, Jewett once wrote in her letters that in ―the country out of which I grew…. Every bush and tree seems like my cousins1. And Annie Fields called her friend ―a true lover of nature and…one accustomed to tender communing with woods and streams, with the garden and the bright air2. Sylvia through family misfortune has come to live with her grandmother. For Sylvia it‘s crucial that she be isolate on her grandmother‘s farm, with no males about, because the conflict in this story occurs with the sudden, unexpected arrival of the ornithologist. The farmhouse is ―lonely‖ (p.162) and Sylvia‘s only ―companion‖ is a prankish milch cow : ― a plodding, dilatory, provoking creature in her behavior, but a valued companion for all that.‖(p.161) Thus with an economy of detail that F.O. Matthiessen found new to her work in A White Heron and other stories3, Jewett establishes the aloneness of her heroine. Though alone-―the child had no playmates‖ (p.161) - Sylvia is not lonesome; indeed she is incomparably happier in the country than she was during the first eight years of her life, spent ―in a crowded manufacturing town‖.(p.162) Released in the environs of the farm, Sylvia seems almost mythically at home: ―there never was such a child for straying about out of doors since the world was made!‖,(p.162) thinks her grandmother. And ―as for Sylvia herself, it seemed as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm‖.(p.162) The key to her vivacity is that she is utterly in harmony with nature. As her grandmother tells the ornithologist. ―There ain‘t foot o‘ ground she don‘t know her way over and the wild creatur‘s counts her one o‘them selves‖ (pp.164-165) The town country antithesis indicated by the contrast between Sylvia‘s earlier life in ―the noisy town‖(p.163) 13 and her previous year on the ―beautiful‖ (p.162)14 farm introduces part of the underlying dialectic of this story. Its next increment appears in the ornithologist, whose presence Sylvia first becomes aware of through his whistle: ―suddenly this little woods-girl is horror-stricken to hear a clear whistle not very far away. Not a bird‘s whistle, determined and somewhat aggressive‖. (p.163) The comparison between bird‘s whistle and a boy‘s helps to emphasize the antithesis between the forest creatures with whom Sylvia is friendly and ―the great red faced boy who used to chase and frighten her‖ (p.163)in her home town, about whom she has been thinking uneasily just before she hears the whistle. That Jewett sees the ornithologist as an outsider inimical to the farm-stead is illustrated by Mrs. Tilley the grandmother‘s reference to her son Dan, who ―was a great hand to go gunning‖(p.164) but who hunted only for food. By contrast, her guest goes gunning in the interest of the science of ornithology, and of his egoistic desire to complete his bird collection. He self-importantly tells Mrs. Tilley. ―I am making a collection of birds myself. I have been at it ever since I was a boy.‖(p.164) Then in response to her question whether the cages them, he says, ―Oh, no they‘re stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens of them…. and I have shot or snared every one myself.‖(p.165) During the ornithologist‘s conversation with his aged hostess, he listens insensitively yet selectively: he ―did not notice [the] hint of family sorrows [in Mrs. Tilley‘s discourse] in his eager interest in something else‖, (p.165) but he grasps alertly the useful information that Sylvia knows all about birds. And at this point he brings up a white heron he has spotted and pursued to the vicinity of the farm. He calls the bird a little white heron, a species unknown to that area. In ornithological fact, such a bird was never more than a causal visitor as far north as southern Maine. It is usually known as the snowy egret, but also as the little white egret and the snowy heron, among several other names. Around the time Jewett wrote her story the snowy egret was being extirpated to fill the need of the millinery industry. By 1900 it was almost extinct, and in 1913 it was completely protected by the federal government. Thus its rareness may have prompted Jewett to select the little white heron for her story in order to give her bird unusual value. In addition, she depicts the creature as odd: the ornithologist describes it as ―a queer tall bird‖ (p.165) and Sylvia instantly knows it as ―that strange white bird‖. (p.165) In order to induce Sylvia to lead him to the sought-after bird, the ornithologist offers a reward of ten dollars. In the moral and dialectical scheme of the story, this offer amounts to a bribe of the poor by the rich, the seduction of good by evil. Its impact on the girl is so great that ―no amount of thought, that night, could decide how many wished-for treasures the ten dollars, so lightly spoken of, could buy‖(p.166). By offering to pay for a favor that would otherwise be done as but a gesture of country hospitality, the ornithologist introduces into a subsistence economy the instrumentality of money. It should also be noted that the introduction of money into the story has the effect of interfering with Sylvia‘s instinctive harmony with the natural world. As the ornithologist tells of his quest for the heron, the girl has been watching a hop-toad and disguising her recognition of the white bird he has referred to. But after the ten dollars has been mentioned, ―Sylvia still watched the toad, not divining as she might have done at some calmer time, that the creature whishes to get to its hole under the doorstep, and was much hindered by the unusual spectators at that hour in the evening‖ (p.166). Her mind on the treasures his money could buy, she loses her usual sympathy for the wild. Bu her socialization as a girl, (as she wanted to be protective enough as the Heron) ironically, saves her from revealing the bird and therefore betraying her world to this intruder. Part 2 of ―A White Heron‖ relates Sylvia‘s quest for the sought-after bird and focuses on a giant pine tree, ―the last of its generation‖ (p.167) to remain standing in the wake of the woodchoppers. The excitement that Sylvia felt while walking behind the ornithologist the previous day has been superseded by ―a new excitement‖(p.168) as she thinks of climbing the tree to enable her to ―see all the world, and easily discover whence the white heron flew and mark the place and find the hidden nest.‖(p.169) At this point in the story the narrator formulates its crux : ―Alas, if the great wave of human interest which flooded for the first time this dull life should sweep away the satisfactions of an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest!‖ (p.168) Once she is aloft in the pine tree, ―the sharp dry twigs caught and held her and scratched her like angry talons, the pitch made her little fingers clumsy and stiff‖(p.168) as though nature itself sought to keep her from succeeding in her project and thereby breaching their heart to heart relationship. The higher Sylvia climbs, however, the more her harmony with nature seems restored. Jewett personifies the great tree as in a fairy tale: ―The old pine-tree must have loved his new dependent‖ (p.169) supporting and lifting her along the way to this summit. Purified in the heights she has reached, Sylvia becomes metaphorically at one with the universe: her face is ―like a pale star.‖ and she feels ―as if she…could go flying among the clouds‖ (p.169) with a pair of hawks. Despite the wonder of the view from atop the tree, the girl resolutely wants to discover the white heron‘s nest: ―was this wonderful sight and pageant of the world the only reward for having climbed to such a giddy height.‖(p.169) At this point the narrator shifts into the imperative mood and the present tense, pointing out to Sylvia the white heron rising in flight from a dead hemlock far below, directing her to remain motionless and from a dead hemlock far below, directing her to remain motionless and unconscious lest she reveal herself and deflect the bird from reaching the perch he assumes on a pine bough close to her. ―Well satisfied‖ by knowing the secret of the heron‘s nesting place, Sylvia painfully ―makes her perilous way down again‖,(p.170) filled with thoughts of the ornithologist response to her news of the bird‘s location. Her heart stirred for a bird, ―Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron‘s secret and give its life away‖. (p.170) The final paragraph also contains this vivid picture of the fate that would have awaited the white heron had Sylvia revealed its nest to the collector: ―the sharp report of his gun and the piteous sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood.‖(p.171). As the story concludes, all woodland and summertime secrets are like, the heron‘s, safe with ―this lonely country child‖.(p.171) For in the end the heron‘s life has become the equivalent of the girl‘s life, at least of her existence heart to heart with nature. In addition, the heron signifies the solemnity and beauty of the natural world that human beings relinquish at the cost of impoverishing their existence. For Sylvia, to surrender the bird would be to surrender her integrity with the natural world as well as with herself, since the heron has come to represent any thing precious that a girl might yield for the sake of a man, but only at her peril. Jewett wanted to project the humility, innocence and candidness of Sylvia through this story. Sylvia, the cow and the heron are inimical to the story as they are all one representing the purity within and thus all are as white and as pure as the Heron. Thus Jewett‘s ―A white Heron presents before us a dialogue between nature and nature. It also projects an ecological view that how at the cost of destruction of nature we are attaining technological advancements and bringing all evils to the society. So even after hundred years of its publication, it holds its relevance even today.
References: 1. Francis Otto Matthiessen ,Sarah Orne Jewett(Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1929), p.48 2. The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields(Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1886),pp.59-60 3. Matttiessen, p.82 4. A White Heron and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886) All the references in the parenthesis are from this book. Dr. Archana Parashar is a Lecturer at SGSITS, Indore. (M.P). Her specialization is American Literature. She also has passion for Indian Writing in English and Subaltern Studies. Presently she is engaged in teaching Communication Skills to the Engineering Students.
STIFLED VOICES IN DIASPORA SPACES: THE STEREOTYPE AND THE HOUSEWIFE, A STUDY IN CULTURAL DISLOCATION
Ms Basudhara Roy
―In all her eighteen years, she could scarcely remember a moment that she had spent alone. Until she married. And came to London to sit day after day in this large box with the furniture to dust, and the muffled sounds of private lives sealed away above, below and around her.‖ (Brick Lane, 2003:16) ―Silence disturbed her. When she could detect no thumps and knocks on the door, no dangerous shuffling of drunkards, no keys being slid into locks, only a vast unnerving silence, she began to panic.‖ (Wife, 1990:128) ―‗Here, in this place where Mr. Sen has brought me, I cannot sometimes sleep in so much silence.‖‘ (Mrs. Sen‟s, Interpreter of Maladies, 2001:115) This triad of female voices seems to be articulating a single tale - of forced isolation, feared silences, and an unchanging pattern of life. Add to it another female voice, a stronger one, that of the exiled Taslima Nasreen: ―My world is gradually shrinking. I, who once roamed the streets without a care in the world, am now shackled. Always outspoken, I am now silenced, unable to demonstrate, left without the means of protesting for what I hold dear.‖ (Banished within and without, The Times of India, 18 November, 2007) and the harmony remains unaltered for oppression is oppression, exile is exile and for several South-Asian women marriage in stereotypical cultural terms, is itself exilic. The girl who crosses the threshold of her ‗first‘ home, becomes, so to speak, Rushdie‘s ―translated‖ individual with a new identity ranging from nomenclature to biology, a new role, and a new set of values to adopt. The sense of uprootedness, identity-rupture and geographical, cultural and psychological dislocation gains in poignancy in the case of the migrant wife whose ordained matrimonial shift calls for a journey into a new country altogether where she loses sight of all the fixities of her former world. And the tragedy is greater when adherence to stereotypical native feminine roles is demanded even in a changed cultural landscape, thus disallowing acculturation and fragmenting identity. Today, a burgeoning literature pertaining to the experience of South-Asians abroad not only exists but has been, to a large extent, canonized. However, much of migrant literature has tended to overlook the gendered nature of lived diaspora experience. The specific experiential factors governing the class of the married female migrant which mostly immigrates under the family reunification scheme or on a sponsored or dependent visa, has been little explored. This paper proceeds with the hypothesis that keeping as constant the sense of disease for both the spouses in a new land, the vulnerability of the migrant wife to the pressures of diaspora living is several degrees greater than that of her male counterpart, partly on account of their different socio-cultural positioning and partly because of the culturally inflexible notion of the ‗housewife role‘ looming large on them both. It is known that the onslaught of globalization and the crumbling down of all borders and boundaries in its wake has witnessed an accelerated expansion of the South-Asian diaspora and as immigration policies have become more flexible, one increasingly observes migrant bachelors, for all their transnationality, coming ‗home‘ for arranged marriages and native wives, prompted by a desire to metaphorically establish a cultural and psychological unit of ‗homeland‘ in alien frontiers. Mainstream bollywood cinematic texts periodically reiterate such plots (whether in Pardes,1997 or Bride and Prejudice,2004 or Life Partner,2009) and in the majority of the cases, the balance of the eligible migrant bachelor weighs in favour of the ‗traditional‘ as opposed to the ‗modern‘ native girl, giving rise to stereotypical views of the ‗traditional‘ woman as being the sole guardian of unadulterated cultural values. The word ‗stereotype‘ has been for long in use in the field of gender studies. Generally defined as ‗a conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image‘ or more specifically as an ‗image perpetuated without change‘, feminism has reiterated how the stereotype exploits woman as merely a biological category to be assessed solely in terms of fertility and domestic management. Though unfair, the burden of the stereotype is better borne in a culture-support community where at least convention standardizes and reinforces the unjust patriarchal code and all women from mother to daughter are socialized into acknowledging victimization. The parameters of female distress vary greatly with cultural dislocation since the woman, in addition to resisting her own culture shock is expected to act as a buffer for her family by perpetuating native values. What the American sociologist, Jessie Bernard terms as the ‗Pygmalion effect‘ i.e. ―the wife‘s ‗redefinition of the self and an active reshaping of the personality to conform to the wishes or needs of husbands‘‖ (Sociology Themes and Perspectives, 387) is more hazardously carried out within the strongholds of a new culture since its anomaly weakens its ideological compulsion. With marriage, the South-Asian wife is expected to mirror the husband and ―her self- image deteriorates as she accommodates to her husband rather than fulfilling herself as a person in her own right.‖ (Sociology Themes and Perspectives, 387) But in an alien culture accommodation becomes tougher as the absoluteness of the necessity to accommodate is implicitly questioned by more liberal Western cultural norms. In the three female narratives that this paper takes up for analysis – Nazneen‘s narrative in Monica Ali‘s „Brick lane‟, Dimple‘s narrative in Bharati Mukherjee‘s „Wife‟ and Mrs. Sen‘s narrative in Jhumpa Lahiri‘s „Mrs. Sen‟s‟ from „The Inrerpreter of Maladies‟, the women lead stifled lives carrying the burden of the stereotype against the reality of living in a culturally altered world. Carefully chosen to safeguard native values in their diaspora space, they experience ceaseless anguish and a dislocation of identity at the perpetual conflict between their self and the role assigned to them. For the migrant male, diaspora life revolves around two distinct spheres – the domestic and the professional, both of which he straddles with considerable ease. This is because most workplaces are governed by standardized international codes of professional or industrial behavior which iron out much of the racial and cultural acrimony that is a part and parcel of diaspora living while the domestic space is a neatly-fashioned unit of homeland where the culturally uncorrupted wife perpetuates the traditions he has left behind, making it a potent site for his psychological and cultural grounding. One may stop here to observe the sharp contrast between the diaspora-discomfort of the professionally and economically competent Dr. Azad and the greater ease and confidence of the professionally insecure Chanu in Ali‘s ‗Brick Lane‖. Keeping in mind the fact that the former has been part of London for a much longer span of time and is firmly grounded in its milieu through his position as a doctor there, Dr. Azad should have been more at ease in his diaspora space. Yet he appears so diffident that even the unemployed, unglamorous, professional failure Chanu seems to have an edge over him, a difference easily attributable to their relative control over their domestic world. Dr. Azad has, so as to speak, been culturally betrayed by a wife who has readily acclimatized to her new world and shaken off the yoke of South-Asian patriarchy for a different marital equation unlike Nazneen who succumbs to building up a Bangladeshi home in London for Chanu to reign over. Sociologists like Ann Oakley have long singled out culture as the prime determinant of gender roles and the primacy of the housewife-mother role along with values of self-effacing service, purity, chastity and ideological submission to the husband in South-Asian culture complicates the cultural relocation of the South-Asian migrant wife. Her diaspora world, its borders culturally determined, is extremely limited. Employment opportunities being mostly denied to her and even her social interactions in her new space being subject to mediations by her husband, her world is abysmally lonely and fragmented, weaving itself out in memories, suppressed desires and self- alienation that takes the form of mental depression symptomised in food disorders, unnatural impulses and insomnia. Monica Ali‘s protagonist in ‗Brick Lane‟, Nazneen, is a product of generations of South-Asian female passivity, resignation, and restraint and even in London, a minor inconspicuous freedom such as going out is denied to her. Not that Chanu disapproves of it on personal terms- ―Personally, I don‘t mind if you go out…‖ and ―I don‘t stop you from doing anything. I am westernized now.‖ (Brick Lane, 2003:39). But he has his native diaspora community to think of - ―Why should you go out? If you go out, ten people will say, ‗I saw her walking on the street.‘ And I will look like a fool…‖ (Brick Lane, 2003:39) Chanu‘s words belie his professed beliefs for although he leaves no stone unturned to be different from the other peasant-class ignorant and close-minded Bangladeshis, the Sylhetis, who all come abroad to earn money and live clumped together unhygenically in one-roomed quarters, yet he suffers no loss of dignity in subscribing to their views. His ‗westernization‘ has merely comprised a change in dress, pedantic education and some degree of technological literacy ―And anyway, if you were in Bangladesh you would not go out. Coming here you are not missing anything, only broadening your horizons.” (Brick Lane, 2003:39, my italics) The irony of Chanu‘s statement can hardly be more penetrating when we realize that Nazneen‘s horizons in London are not only mentally but even physically bound by the threshold of her house. Not only this, the ‗westernized‘ Chanu also sees no point in her joining classes to learn English, the language that shall serve as her social, political and cultural passport to diaspora life. No matter that her absent knowledge of English causes him inconveniences which he can complain of to others – her inability to put his files in order and to be an intellectual companion to him. He strongly feels that her duties as a wife and mother are far more significant than her knowledge of English in London : ―You‘re going to be a mother…Babies have to be fed; they have to have their bottoms cleaned. It‘s not so simple as that. Just go to college, like that.‖ (Brick Lane, 2003:75) And yet, it is her linguistic participation in her new environment which grants Nazneen her first sense of satisfaction in her diaspora identity. She had said ‗sorry‘ to a stranger on the street: ―..and in spite of the fact that she was lost and cold and stupid, she began to feel a little pleased. She had spoken in English to a stranger, and she had been understood and acknowledged. It was very little. But it was something.‖ (Brick Lane, 2003:57) As for Dimple and Mrs. Sen, English is not completely an alien language seeing that they manage to converse relatively well with Milt and Eliot respectively but their use of it remains minimal, for both, like Nazneen, are denied a professional sphere within which to seek another identity. In the orthodox immigrant Bangladeshi world of ―Brick Lane‖, the woman going out to work shames her husband as it becomes a marker of his inability to maintain his family. But even educated men of the likes of Amit Dasgupta and Jyoti Sen in the more glamorous world of Bharati Mukherjee‘s ‗Wife‘ share such stereotypical assumptions. The world of Mrs. Sen seems tragically estranged from a community of any sort and one cannot help but feel that an employment would be a psychological support for her in constructing a sense of identity related to ‗here‘ rather than ‗there‘. In fact, the problem of identity negotiation becomes a diifficult one especially for the South-Asian migrant woman as she fell victim to a theory of reception which to my understanding, is very see-saw like. If she adheres rigidly to her cultural norms, as the South-Asian patriarchal code demands of her, she risks being subject to more severe practices of racism by mainstream society to what it interprets as cultural resistance, and any effort on her part towards acculturation is looked upon by the androcentric mindset of the home diaspora community with suspicion and even contempt. In the world of both „Brick Lane‟ and „Wife‟, we observe that their increasing degrees of acculturation alienate the women from their native communities. The working Jorina and Razia and later Nazneen become clear outcastes from their home communities while the glamorous, chain-smoking Ina Mullick is clearly not the ‗type‘ of the Meena Sens which dominate the Bengali diaspora group in New York. But the truth remains that rejection by one‘s home community is more psychologically oppressing than racial discrimination which can never be entirely eliminated but at least borne with the support of the home diaspora group. The inverse ratio between the density of an immigrant ethnic group and the rate of mental illness among its members stresses the importance of support-diaspora membership. The Bangladeshi diaspora community in „Brick Lane‟ is passing through a phase of change which has enabled several women to raise questions about their patriarchal codes and therefore Nazneen is never really alone but Ina becomes a typical example of the acutely hyphenated individual. ―There are no Bengalis in my group…no Indians,‖ (Wife, 2003:135) says the Americanized Ina but even she cannot escape mental depression. Try as she does, she can never make herself understood to the likes of the American Leni and at the same time, the refuge of her home community is unavailable to her as she has shed its values long ago. ―No one – no Bengali, not my husband, not you, absolutely no one understands me. Do you know that last night I seriously thought of suicide?‖ (Wife, 1990:136) Dimple Dasgupta, the protagonist of Bharati Mukherjee‘s ‗Wife‘, a recent arrival to New York feels it obligatory to be part of the Bengali community there and to uphold the traditions of pure Bengali womanhood but this self-imposed role contests with the demands of her new situation and her response to it. This manifests itself most significantly in Dimple‘s ambivalent relationship with Ina with whom she shares a psychological affinity but which she prefers to keep unacknowledged because Ina, with her Americanized lifestyle, is an unapproved member of the Bengali diaspora. However, Dimple‘s aspirations towards Americanization are not very different from Ina‘s. In fact, for most migrant South-Asian women, dress becomes a significant metaphor for identity. South-Asian traditional garments being prominent visual markers of ethnicity, of the conspicuous ‗other‘, the shedding of traditional dressing patterns in favour of western outfits becomes the first step towards female identity- negotiation with the new environment. Dimple‘s present has been Ina‘s past, reveals Ina as she draws for her the images of her transition from ‗Before‘ to ‗After‘- from sarees to ―pants and mascara‖ and though Dimple states wistfully that she has always been a ‗Before‘, she tries to switch occasionally into an American identity through Marsha‘s clothes and assiduously watches American soaps and flips through lifestyle magazines vicariously living the American life that her husband, Amit, denies her. On a trip to the beach Dimple envies the skirt and smock clad Ina and looking at herself through Ina‘s eyes she―…felt ashamed of her sari-swathed skinny body: it seemed so inappropriate a body for having fun on an American beach‖ (Wife, 1990:103) Ina on the other hand, having culturally crossed over to the other side finds the grass on Dimple‘s side greener – ―I think it is better to stay a Before, if you can,‖ she says. ―Our trouble here is that we imitate badly and preserve things even worse.‖ (Wife, 1990:95) Nazneen‘s friend, Razia, in her man‘s trousers with her union jack jacket and her hair cropped short is a working-class version of the rich but crude Mrs. Azad and the elite Ina, both of who can be said to have, in a way, ―arrived‖ in their diaspora status, seeking new accultured identities in open defiance of their husbands and even within Nazneen‘s psyche lurks the aspiration to explore a new identity through Western clothes – ―Suddenly she was gripped by the idea that if she changed her clothes her entire life would change as well…If she wore trousers and underwear, like the girl with the big camera on Brick Lane, then she would roam the streets fearless and proud…‖ (Brick Lane, 2003:297) Mrs. Sen, though she does not appear to be influenced by Western modes of dress, yet finds it difficult to relate her wardrobe of sarees to her new world, handling them as nostalgically as if they were the relics of a past forever left behind. Along with dress, food also serves as a metaphor for identity for these suppressed women. While for Mrs. Sen, food becomes a metaphor for Calcutta and her Bengali identity, Dimple tries to feel more Americanized through buying of American tinned food although she may not eat it. In fact, food, in the three female narratives, serves as a feminist weapon against diaspora patriarchal domination. The otherwise docile Mrs. Sen can order her husband around when it comes to fish and her Indian cooking becomes for her the sole medium to vicariously experience the community-kitchen companionship which she abysmally lacks. Ina, whose association with the Women‘s Liberation ideology has been highlighted from the beginning of the novel, turns against food as a symbol of female subordination stating: ―Why is food our national obsession? Why don‘t we make more time for happiness? For love?‖ and it is indeed this view which the other women come around to. Both Dimple and Nazneen almost give up taking formal meals, which apart from marking the beginnings of their silent rebellions against patriarchy, serves as a medical symptom of the depression that their forced silence has bred in them. Recent sociological surveys point out that isolation as a form of marital violence perpetrated against South-Asian diaspora women is rapidly increasing and in Lahiri‘s Mrs. Sen, we come across its typical victim. ―Eliot, if I began to scream right now at the top of my lungs, would someone come?‖ is the question haunting her and aggravating her insecurity in an alien world. (Interpreter of Maladies, 1999:117) Mrs. Sen, in the story, appears much older than her suggested thirty years because her unchanging life pattern, lack of social involvement and an identity construction with reference to the past rather than her present has acutely fragmented her sense of self. She is forever the physical inhabitant of her diaspora landscape and the mental citizen of her homeland and lives sundered between two worlds which are briefly united by the arrival of either fish or a letter from home. Her clumsy and anxious attempt to learn to drive is her voluntary step towards a symbolic self-dependence and social participation in her new life but it proves too much of a strain on her nerves and ends disastrously. The closeted university house with the audio cassette repeatedly reminding her of her last day at home along with the aerograms from Calcutta in a shoe-box and her mind full of memories is her only existence now. The outer world of Canada where the smell of her beloved fish, symbolic of her home, identity and culture, is detested is not for her, and her break with it is irrevocable with her final failure in the act of driving. In Dimple, the conflict between the perfect Bengali housewife that she feels ideologically obliged to be and the desire to respond to her new life is so acute that having been impulsively involved in a physical relationship with Milt, the sight of Amit, the guardian and implicit enforcer of her idealism, gives rise in her to such an uncontrollable pang of guilt, that in a highly strung state of nervous excitement, she firsts kills Amit, her psychological tormentor and then herself. Her affair with Milt, although beyond Amit‘s knowledge had, right since its inception, caused her pangs of guilt. Jarring upon the ideal of the pure Bengali wife that she had built around her conscious self, her adultery shocks her. She sees her hatred of herself being manifested through Amit and his inability to turn against her, to respond to her moral transgression with passionate anger and unreasonableness causes her to physically produce the reaction that her idealism willed to punish her guilt. Sandwiched between the choice of being a Before of the kind of Meena Sen and an After of the kind of Ina Mullick, Dimple leads in her imagination the vicarious life of an After but shaken awake by the realization of imagination flowing into reality, her still Before super-ego violently punishes her After id in a frenzied fit of depression. Nazneen alone, of these three women manages to move towards salvation. Although her earliest memories of home are those of her mother reiterating to her the tale of ―How She Was Left to Her Fate‖, Nazneen escapes the fate of both these women, ironically, by taking charge of affairs for the first time in her life. Not only does she choose to stay back in London with her daughters without Chanu, but also refuses her lover Karim, another would-be patriarchal figure for all his westernization. She works towards economic independence by forming a workers‘ cooperative among the women of her diaspora community and by initiating her involvement in her new society and allowing her daughters the freedom to be ‗English‘ rather than ‗Bangladeshi‘, Nazneen shakes off the cultural stereotype haunting her, comes out of a cultural ghettoisation towards diaspora integration and shows the way for the emancipation of the South-Asian migrant wife.
Works Cited: 1. Monica Ali, Brick Lane, New York: Scribner, 2003. 2. Bharati Mukherjee, Wife, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1990. 3. Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2001. 4. M. Haralambos with Robin Heald, Sociology Themes and Perspectives, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2006.
-----
FEMALE CHARACTER AS CAREER WOMEN IN THE NOVELS OF SHASHI DESHPANDE
Chhaya Malviya
Shashi Deshpande is essentially a novelist of Career Women. Career is an opportunity through which a person‘s individuality is expressed, identified and rewarded. A woman's commitment to a career reflects her desire to fulfill her own dreams and strength. It rejects dependence on a relationship as a mother, wife or a daughter. An Indian woman, in the past, has been denied opportunities to emerge as a force professionally. Early marriage and purdah system confined her behind the walls of her home. Her identity decided her roles as wife and mother --as a foundation of happy family. The British rule in India heralded a new chapter of development of women by introducing education for women and social reforms like abolition of Sati; widow‘s remarriage etc Post- independence Indian society has witnessed the massive mobilization of women as career seekers in every field of life. The constitution also provides equal rights and privileges for women at par with men. The Five Year plans also stress on the vocational and occupational opportunity for women's education and the modern technological innovations played a vital role for the professional development of women. At present, there is a demand of 33% reservation for women in parliament: We can see doctors engineers, and administrative officers, beauticians, film heroines, films directors and others in every walk of male-dominated world. But as career women, she has to balance between her home and career which demands her double role and taxes her miserably. The career woman is constantly trying to live as an economically independent individual. Yet it is rather surprising that the professional aspect of a woman's life has been ignored by men writers. Even women writers have not done better in this context. The need for women's financial independence has not received the emphasis it deserves for their works. In Indian English literature, Kamala Markandaya, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala and Anita Desai have not discussed at length the attempts of women to gain financial independence since their focus is entirely different. A few career women, no doubt, figure among the minor characters in their novels, but their professional life is not discussed in detail. Nayantara Sahgal does better than her predecessors in the depiction of career women, especially in her later novels. More than any of these women novelists, it is Shashi Deshpande who tries to project women who endeavour to give equal importance to their professional as well as personal lives. Shashi Deshpande's protagonists- Indu (Roots and Shadows), Saru ( The Dark Holds No Terrors), Jaya (That Long Silence) and Urmila (The Binding Vine)- all are career women. She tries to address particularly the problems of the middle- class working women. Her career women try to redefine human relationships in view of the newly acquired professional status. 'Career woman' is a result of feminist movement from the West which concentrates on the freedom of women from the clutches of the male dominance. She is not "life contracted unpaid workers" as Germaine Greer has observed and she is always conscious for her rights and identity as a woman. But Shashi Deshpande's Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors emerges as a whole woman who is independent and establishes herself beyond the cultural conflicts neither as a totally liberated woman or the typical westerns nor an orthodox Indian submissive female. Shashi Deshpande's ' Career Woman‘ creates a balance between extreme feminism and the conventional role of submission and self denial in the Indian context. The career woman is also a new woman. We can find Indu in Roots and Shadows, Jaya in That Long Silence, Urmila in The Binding vine and Saru, The Dark Holds No Terrors as Career women who face conflicts and predicaments of their career inside and outside their homes. The present chapter concentrates on 'Career woman' in the novels of Shashi Deshpande in the context of tradition and modernity in the fabric of Indian society. Ours is a male- dominated society where woman is only a pretender of happiness. The noted Indian poet, Kamala Das, in one of her poems, Suicide, has thus uttered. "But I must pose I must pretend I must act the role of a happy woman, Happy wife" ‗The career woman has to travel along in order to get the present status as a free woman from bonds of traditions. As a modern woman, she keeps pace with her quest for womanhood where lie the rays of freedom and happiness from the clutches of rules of male dominated world. Her drama of happiness as a wife comes out of realization of a woman as a victim and every woman loves to have 'a room of her-own' (Virginia Woolf). In recent Indian English fiction, we find that the heroines are conscious of their rights and their places in their society. They are different from a traditional society and modern women. They are aware of their existence and are no longer submissive and living in silence. There is a marked difference in their attitude as compared to that of the heroines of earlier fiction writing till recent years, considered a male domain. As Jane Austen observes in Persuasion: "Men had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been their in so much higher a degree, the pen has been in their hands", (p. 22) But seeing the recent emergence of women writers, who are telling their own story, we know that the pen is no longer in the hands of men only but also in the hands of more women who are conscious of their rights. They have risen in revolt and are raising their voice against their exploitation. Some important women novelists who have portrayed strong, determined and assertive heroines are Shashi Deshpande, Kamala Markandaya, Geetha Hariharan and Veena Paintal. The primary motivation of the novel has always been a projection of the social situation and the reflection of social consciousness. Literature reveals principally three sets of relationships- human being in relation to the universe, individual in relation to society, and man in relation to woman. In other words, the novel may be considered a document of social criticism. It tends to reflect the contingent reality in an artistic fashion, Indian novelists have risen to the occasion and adequately reflected the various human relationships, including the images of woman in man-woman relationship. Novel written during the last two decades of the twentieth century provide a glimpse of the female psyche and with a full feminine experience. The Indian Society which has been so conventional and traditional bond could not remain impervious to the new forces that had started impinging on the mind of people. No wonder, the portrayal of women by creative writers is truly reflective regarding the social changes which Indian society is undergoing. Several novels deal with the position of a new woman in such changing society. Many Indian writers now present a picture of economically independent women which is totally different from one dependent image of women in the past. Changes in the economic conditions have brought a remarkable change in our attitude towards gender and as a result, woman has substantially consolidated her position she is no more servile to her husband. In India, both men and women writers have seen women in different relationships. Both intellectuals and sociologists regarded Indian society as a traditionally male- dominated one where individual rights are subordinated to group or social role expectations. Woman has often been a victim of male oppression and has been treated like a burdensome beast. As a result, woman's individual self' has little recognition and seeks effacement. Indian woman has traditionally received such hierarchy, through which she lived with it down the ages. Before marriage, women are brought up strictly according to the traditional and family codes. The moment a girl reaches adolescence, she is reminded of her virginity as a part of her femininity. She is constantly reminded by society that she need not assert her individuality as she becomes the fate of another man which should be the ultimate goal of her life. Feminist movement which originally started in the west has widely spread in India. Analyzing man- woman relationship, Greer uses the analogy of employer and employee and considers women "life- contracted unpaid workers"1 who cannot expect liberation from the clutches of male world. The ideological impact of woman's Liberation Movement is felt by sociologists, intellectuals and the educated in India specially/ in urban areas. But Shashi Deshpande carefully avoids the western feminist's concept of emancipation and presents the Indian version of the modern woman who searches for the whole of her 'identity' and for fragmentations of her 'self' out of the swirling restlessness, Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors2 emerges as a whole woman who is not dependent on anyone else Deshpande cautiously puts aside the western notion of a woman's emergence in terms of separation from her life- partner or for an existence without any relation to male and society, a life in isolation is a state of no existence. Having suffered the long conflict between the cultures of the colonized and the colonizer the Indian woman, Saru, establishes herself neither as a totally liberated woman like the typical westerner nor as an orthodox Indian submissive female. In this respect, she is truly a representative of the middle-class 'new woman' who stands on the crossroad of Indian society reflecting tradition and modernity. Such awakening amongst the feminists and women writers has helped them to project in their writing the image of a 'Career Woman'. In such times when radical change is going on all over the country, it has become quite desirable for women to redefine her new role and determine her contribution to become an integral part of family and society, seeking a true balance between extreme feminism and the conventional role of subjugation and self- denial. The family in India, during the last few decades, has been under process of social change and has been substantially affecting man-woman relationship. It is because of a conspicuous change that there is a marked evaluation of roles and values in the female world. According to the sociological perspective the role of husband-wife relationship is the principal component in the context of family which is undergoing with a vital change as there is a new dawn of growing enlightenment and the movement for women's emancipation. In this regard, literature has played a vital role in raising the readers' consciousness. In various forms, it has provided a glimpse of female psyche and her range of female experience. It portrays, without inhibitions, 'the new woman' who refuses to play a second fiddle to her husband in various aspects of life. For centuries, women in India have been deliberately denied opportunities of growth in the name of religion and ancient socio-cultural practices. At the advent of Independence, women were prey to many abhorrent customs, traditional rigidities and vices due to which their status in society touched its nadir. Besides, there prevailed atmosphere for women which were bleak all around. At the personal plane, women faced their widespread illiteracy, feeble- health, segregation in the dark and dingy rooms in the name of purdah,turning many of them into prostitutes, curse of polygamy degrading sacred rites of matrimony to a system of shameful traffic, putting to death female children, violence used to make women follow sati, commercialized marriage through dowry and, above all, the complete denial of her individuality . At the economic structural plane, the women were prey to economic dependence, early tutelage of husbands and in- laws, heavy domestic workload and 'invisible' and unrecognized work, absence of career and mobility, non- recognition of their economic contribution, poor work conditions and wages, and monotonous jobs which men denied to do. At the socio-political plane, women suffered from the denial of freedom even in their own homes, repression in some direction and unnatural indoctrination in others, unequal and inferior status everywhere, rigid caste hierarchy and untouchability. Most women were reduced to 'dumb driver cattle' and led an inhuman, 'beastly life'3. During pre-independent India, the major force which acted as catalyst in creating awareness and hopes among women were nationalist movement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. Despite their miseries and misfortunes, thousands of women of different communities and all walks of life came out of their homes to join the nationalistic movement as political campaigners, participated actively in the protest marches and demonstrations; faced lathis and bullets; and suffered gallantly the police repression, tortures, incarceration in prison and other indignities at the hands of the British imperialists. Jawahar Lal Nehru, the maker of modern India, admired the role played by females during national movement in freeing India which was symbolic of her own freedom from chains of domestic slavery: "our women came to the fore-front and took charge of the struggle. Women had always been there of course but there was an avalanche of them which took not only the British Government but their own men-folk by surprise. There were these women, women of the upper or middle classes leading sheltered lives in their homes, peasant women, working class women, rich women------pouring out in their tens of thousands in defense of government orders and police lathis. It was not only the display of courage and daring but what was even more surprising was the organizational power they showed."4 He further added "Not only that women sweeped in the high tide of the struggle for independence, but they also launched a separate movement of their own to fight for their rights"5 While breaking the chains of India's slavery, they broke their own age-old shackles. They fought orthodoxy superstition and communal separation. They proved themselves of extraordinary capacities and projected a free, strong and courageous image of Indian womanhood. Events evinced that without the cooperation of women, the freedom struggle would not succeed. It is a kind of marvelous participation in the nationalist movement which had a direct impact on the attitudes of women. They pinned high hopes in the solemn declarations made during the struggle for independence. Mahatma Gandhi- The Father of the Nation- at whose call thousands of women of all classes plunged into the political movement declared that the leit motif of the independence struggle was: "to gain independence not for the literate and the rich in India, but for the dumb millions,...... I shall work in Indian in which the poorest shall feel that it is their country in whose making they have an effective voice, an India in which there shall be no high class and low class of people"6 Gandhiji's half of India's 'dumb million' were women for whom he wanted independence along with the other half consisting of men. One of the goals Gandhiji wished to achieve through the nationalist movement was equality for women. In fact, his life- mission was to bring women on equal footing with men which he declared in no uncertain terms: "I am uncompromising in the matter of women's rights. In my opinion, she should labor under no legal disabilities not suffered by man. I should treat the daughters and sons on a footing of perfect equality"7 He also writes in Young India: "Woman is the companion of man gifted with equal mental capacities. She has the right to participate in minutest details of the activities of man and she has the same right of freedom and liberty as he...... By sheer force of a vicious custom, even the most ignorant and worthless men have been enjoying a superiority over women which they do not deserve and ought not to have"8 Women were Gandhi's 'last persons' whose tears he wanted to wipe and without whose liberation, he thought, the independence was superficial. With the declaration of Independence and the transfer of political power, women's movement of yesterday's freedom suddenly subdued. Only a minority of erstwhile radical women leaders carried their activities even during the post- independence period. Since the ultimate mission of struggle for independence was fulfilled many women activists found no reason to continue their activities. Some of them retreated to the security of their homes. The ordinary women became busy in recovering their lost homes. Only a small section of wealthy and well-to-do women could go in for politics or enter any one of a number of professions barely within a year since Independence, Mahatma Gandhi the champion of women's cause, went out of the scene. The Independence, thus, by no means, automatically improved the lives of women. Several barriers, many old and many new, stood in the way of improvement in the condition of women in different domains of their lives. Undoubtedly, Independence brought the promise of actual liberation and equality. And, in the years following freedom, tremendous ------were felt in the status of women in Indian society. Education has been identified as the major instrument for raising the status of women. For promotion of gender equality, the access to education for women played a vital role on the road of freedom during the last forty years and has elevated women in a number of ways. It has created awareness among women and enabled them to be self- reliant. It has brought women in contact with the philosophy and meaning of liberation and that of the democratic values and traditions of the west. It has deferred the age of marriage, postponed the mothering responsibility and enabled them to seek a career. It has given rise to new equations in the relationship between husband and wife and enabled women to exercise their choice in the selection of the life partner9. Simone De Beauvoir rightly assesses the problems of women's freedom: "A woman supported by a man, wife or courtesan-is not emancipated from the male because she has a ballet in her hand, if custom imposes less constraint upon her than formerly, the negative freedom implied has not profoundly modified her situation, she remains bound in her condition of vassalage. It is through gainful employment that women has traversed most of the distance that separated her from the male; and nothing else can guarantee her liberty in practice"10 Shashi Deshpande is aware of the predicament of a woman in a male- dominated society especially when the woman is not economically independent. In The Dark Holds No Terrors, there is a reference to a woman, who, ill- treated by her in-laws, drowns herself into a well. In another instance, a woman is chained to a peg by her in-laws in the cattle shed, grieved and hurt at such a gesture Saru desires to become economically and ideologically independent. Sadly, economic independence has not automatically resulted in full fledged autonomy. They are caught in a conflict between their familial and professional roles, between individual aspirations and social demands. Indu of Roots and Shadows and Jaya of That Long Silence, being women writers, are torn between self- expression and social stigmas-material and psychological. They finally, somehow, fully succeed in overcoming social stigmas, asserting their individuality and in realizing their context in the professional area. Shashi Deshpande's career women "are not satisfied with the rhetoric of equality between men and women but want to see that the right to an individual life and the right to development of their individual capabilities are realized in their own lives"11 Simone De Beauvoir has rightly remarked: "The fact is that men are beginning to resign themselves to the new status of woman; and she, not feeling condemned in advance, has begun to feel more at ease. Today the woman who works is less neglectful of her femininity than formerly, and she does not lose her sexual attractiveness...... If the difficulties are more evident in the case of the independent woman, it is because she has chosen battle rather than resignation. All the problems of life find a silent solution in death; a woman who is busy with living is therefore more at variance with herself than is she who buries her will and her desires; but the former will not take the latter as a standard. She considers herself at a disadvantage only in comparison with man"12 Saru of The Dark Holds No Terrors becomes a doctor in order to be economically and ideologically independent. She becomes a successful doctor but ironically her professional success prompts her jealous husband to treat her brutally. To escape from his torture, she even prepares to resign her job. But he is not prepared to lose her income and the comforts it brings. She searches for a refuge and wonders whether her parental home can be one. On introspection, she realizes that she is her own refuge. Her success as a doctor reinforces her feeling of self- esteem. In the end, she realizes that her profession is her own and she will decide what to do with it, ―My life is my own",13 She is fully aware that career is an essential part of her life and that she cannot sacrifice it in order to salvage her marriage. In fact, in moments of despair, it is her profession that has given her necessary courage to face life and therefore it is indispensable for her. She succeeds in realizing her selfhood through her profession. So she sets out to attend to a patient. Saru thus proves to the world that economically independent women like her can bring change in the society and that women as individuals can have some significant control over their relationships and professions. Thus, "Sarita, in The Dark Holds No Terrors, depicts the journey of modern woman towards financial independence, emotional balance and social recognition" 14 Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence (1988) is mainly concerned with the state of the modern Indian woman who is constantly trying to know herself. The silence of an Indian housewife is the major concern in this novel. The inner conflict in new woman is expressed in the novel, at the same time, there is quest for identity as ShashiDeshpande tells about the novel: "And then I wrote That Long Silence, almost entirely a woman's novel, nevertheless, a book about the silencing of one- half of humanity. A lifetime of introspection went into this novel, the one closest to me personally; the thinking and ideas in this are closest to my own"15 In this novel Jaya represents one half of humanity. Her husband's indifferent attitude towards others seems to be his 'superiority' for Jaya. She is not interested in knowing how he had managed to get the job. She wants to be 'Gandhari' of modern days, an ideal wife, and her eyes tightly bandaged and she didn't want to know anything. She was happy to move to Bombay. She was delighted that they could send their children to good schools. She could have decent clothes, a fridge, a gas connection and travelling first class. She is a typical modern Indian wife who is not very fussy about her likes and dislikes. She has a perfect understanding of Mohan's nature. "I know you better than you know yourself," I had once told Mohan, and I meant it"16 When Jaya knew that to Mohan, anger of a woman makes her 'unwomanly,' she had learnt to control, her anger. She had learnt other things also. She understood that the duties of 'a woman' are the most important thing for the woman in her family. All other things are less important. Jaya has been a writer of promise and had even won a prize for one of her short stories. Mohan, her husband, encourages her to write and even introduces her to editor of papers and magazines. However, he finds her themes autobiographical in nature and therefore objectionable. He even cites a story and accuses her for having exposed their personal life through it. She begins to compromise with Mohan's demands and that has affected her writing career drastically. In order to fulfill her roles as wife and mother, as Mohan wants them to be, she is even prepared to sacrifice her career. She shifts to writing light, humorous pieces in newspaper called 'middles', where she need not present her views and ideas. Later, she starts on her weekly column, 'Sita' about the daily routine of a middle-class house wife. These lack depth of feeling yet are acceptable to Mohan. Thus, like Indu of Roots and Shadows, Jaya, also is forced to be false to herself as a writer. Jaya after deep concern realizes that she has failed as a writer for which she has made enormous sacrifice for her profession for her aspirations to see that her marriage is not jeopardized. She knows that she does not speak in her true voice and present her personal vision. She now realizes that she cannot be a complete woman if she remains a wife or a mother and ignores the other equally important self, namely a writer. She finally decides to give up the 'Sita' column and to write what she really wants to write. Thus, at the end, Jaya succeeds in creating a fuller self: "In a way, the protagonist, Jaya, is any modern woman who resents her husband's callousness and becomes the victim of circumstances. By implication the character of Jaya represents modern woman's ambivalent attitude to married life"17 The emotions in Jaya are expressed in traditional style at the end: "We don't change overnight. It's possible that we may not change even over long periods of time. But we can always hope. Without that, life would be impossible. And if there is anything I know now it is this: 'Life has always to be made possible "18 Shashi Deshpande's Jaya is over weighted with age-old traditional belief, but, at the same time, she welcomes new ideas: "Deshpande's protagonists finally try their best to conform to their roles and the novel ends with an optimistic tone with the possibility of some positive action in future. The novelist emerges in them as a bridge builder between the old and the new, between tradition and modern-city"19 Simone De Beauvoir has rightly assessed the situation of woman: "Sometimes her lover or husband asks her to renounce her career...... If she yields, she is once more a vassal; if she refuses, she condemns herself to a withering solitude. Today a man is usually willing to have his companion continue her work, the novels of Colette Yver, showing young woman driven to sacrifice their professions for the sake of peace and the family, are rather out dated; living together is an enrichment for two free beings, and each finds security for his or her own independence in the occupation of the male"20 "The hope for Indian women lies in the happy fact that though there are Miras and Kalpanas and Shakutalas, we also have our Urmilas"21 Talking to an interviewer, Deshpande says, ―having a life outside the family is very important for women."22 Accordingly her women protagonists- Indu, Saru, Jaya and Urmila-- succeed in constructing a self through individual professional achievement. They also manage to come to terms with themselves by redefining their relationships, accepting at the same time social constraints and emerge as fully developed individuals doing justice in their domestic as well as professional fields. Awakening amongst Indian Women is largely due to the spread of education and impact of the Western Indian life and society. The women writers in India, placed in an orthodox culture, have their roots in their native soil but encounter an invading western sociological phenomenon, the ‗feminist movement', which calls for the liberation of women from the age old clutches of servility. Saru the protagonist of Shashi Deshpande's The Dark Holds No Terrors suffers from gender discrimination since her birth. Subsequently, she develops a sense of hatred towards her mother who always comes in the way of her progress, imposing restrictions on her daughter without understanding that the new generation is passing through a transitional period where the daughter is sandwiched between tradition and modernity. It presents the conflict between Saru and her mother which represents the clash between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern while Saru suffers discrimination as a daughter, she is in no better position as a wife. According to Manu, the law maker of the Indian orthodox culture, women can never be a decision maker: "A girl, as young women, or even an old woman should not do anything independently, even in (her) house"23 In the Indian culture, a woman's identity is defined by others, in terms of her relationship with men, as a daughter, a wife, a mother, for she does not have an identity of her own. But here Deshpande and Saru seem to think that a woman's life is her own and the time has come when a woman must think as an individual. The last phase of Sarita's life brings her face to face with her own self. In feminist terms, Saru's return to her parental home could be interpreted as what Kristeva calls ―the refusal of the temporal order and the search for a landscape that would accommodate their need"24 Loneliness, one of the concerns of the modern society, is not a disease, but a symptom of man's condition and this awareness is the first milestone in one's journey towards realizing oneself. Edmund fuller remarks: "Man suffers not only from war, persecution, famine and ruin but from inner problem...... a conviction of isolation, randomness, (and) meaninglessness in his way of existence"25 As long as the woman mutely accepted and practiced the age-old traditions and customs like clearing up "the mess with her bare hands, after each meal," and "eating off the same dirty plate her husband had eaten earlier", "getting married and bearing children," sharing the belief that "a woman can't live her alone"26 accepting to be "obedient and unquestioning", looking at husband as" a definite article, permanent" not only for now, but for ever, and so on, she felt secure and had the feeling of togetherness. Now that the new education has gradually made her conscious of the futility or emptiness of the various long preserved notions and taboos about the woman, she has started opposing and breaking them. And this crusade at times makes her feel alone and alienated. The women in Shashi Deshpande's novel depict the new woman's struggle against all odds. One half of the humanity can't be neglected in this modern world. Therefore, Deshpande's major concern as a creative writer is her female characters, their plight, their suffering, and their own solutions to the problems created by the world. She knows that her silence has been too long, but somebody has to break it. Her characters- have positive attitude towards life, though the world around them is sometimes unfriendly towards them. Her characters are full of strength and weakness. They help others without sacrificing their own values. Thus we see that the important insight that Shashi Deshpande imparts to us through her female characters is that women should accept their own responsibility for what they are, see how much they have contributed to their own victimization, instead of putting the blame on everybody except themselves. It is only self- analysis and self- understanding, through vigilance and courage that, they can begin to change their lives. They will have to fight their own battles and have to overcome them. In brief we can say that woman is both winner and loser and she has to set a milestone of success on the path of life which is full of pebbles and thorns in forms of problems. She has to be her own problem-shooter and has to rise from within. The new woman has to create a balance between her individuality and social responsibility as a member of human society. Life without a life partner becomes a life of isolation and loneliness on earth and nobody is an island in himself or herself. Life is a symbol of peace, love and understanding that men and women have to share for a happy home and a happy life. Shashi Deshpande's "Career Woman" seeks such a balance in her life and society, between tradition and modernity, between profession and individual freedom which can make life heavenly on earth in the Indian context. REFERENCES 1. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, op.cit. p. 329. 2. Shashi Deshpande, The Dark Holds No Terrors, op.cit. p. 24. 3. See, for example, Mahatma Gandhi, Women and Social Injustice (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing House, 1947). 4. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946) p. 27. 5. Pratima Asthana, The Women's Movement in India (Delhi: Vikas, 1974). 6. M.K. Gandhi, India of My Dream (Ahmedabad: Novjivan, 1947). 7. M.K. Gandhi. Women and Social Injustice (Ahmedabad: Navjivan, 1942) 8. M.K. Gandhi, Young India, 26.2.1918. 9. Promilla Kapur, Marriage and the Working Women in India (Delhi: Vikas, 1996). 10. Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, op. cit. p.28 11. Maria Mies, Indian Woman and Patriarchy: Conflicts and Dilemmas of Students and Working women (New Delhi, concept 1980), p.32
------
FAMILY VALUES IN THE INDIAN DIASPORA: A STUDY OF MEENA ALEXANDER‟S “MANHATTAN MUSIC”
Dr Omana Antony
India – one of the most enchanting lands is most acclaimed for her tradition and culture. Indian homes and the family values are the unique features of the Indian culture acknowledged and appreciated world-wide till-date. The moral cords, values, relationships and love-laws practiced by her people are the cementing factors that come in the make-up of an Indian family. The suggestions and pieces of advice of the old texts, the seers, and the thinkers enable each Indian to hold the true spirit of the family to his heart and live in the cultural framework formulated by the tradition of the country. Thus the country upholds family as the basic unit of its society with man as the head of the family and the woman as the ‗grihalaksmi‘, the queen of the house. A lot is expected of the woman of India. She should be as virtuous as the mythological figures ‗Sati‘and ‗Savitri‘. The dignity and chastity of women are held high in the society. The main focus on a girl‘s development is her moral up-bringing. The prime aim of the parents is to bring up their children into good citizens instilling all the possible virtues. Topics like ‗love‘ and ‗sex‘ are supposed to be handled with lot of restrictions. All these specialties make the traditional set-up of Indian families unique in the world itself. However, slowly man assumed the role of a dictator and he started suppressing woman as the master of the house. His oppression reached to the climax when he began to treat her as an object of pleasure. Even in this turmoil of conflicts, the family remained safe in the hands of its woman because she had the caliber to perform the imposed role despite all the victimizations from man. In the post-independent period the campaign of education as a part of women empowerment programme and the unusual passion of the Indians to migrate to the West had a terrific impact on the highly revered family set-up of India. The educated woman of modern India is assertive and independent opposing the culturally imposed traditions and customs. Under the dazzling glamour of westernization and modernization - man, marriage, sex or the family mattered nothing to her. The dilemma of men at the surprising transformation of the feminine attitude was really pitiful. Woman in her struggle to gain her identity and man, in his attempt to retain his authority always confronted with horrible ego clash. Both men and women competed against each other to prove the superiority of their ego. This mentality complimented with extreme freedom has done a lot of harm to the family which can survive only on the harmony between man and woman. The biggest impact of this situation is on the families in the Indian Diaspora. Meena Alexander‘s Manhattan Music which deals with the life of the Indians in the diaspora is one of the best examples to study the effect of westernization on Indian family. Meena Alexander, the famous Indian English writer is a victim of multiple migrations. Born in India, educated in Sudan she took her Doctorate from Nottingham and settled down in New York City with her family, Alexander was crisscrossing over the four Continents and also within the continents. With each migratory movement she had to confront the challenges of the new culture opposed by the pains of uprooting and exile. These continuous relocations had made her struggle a lot to forge a sense of identity. As a girl from India, Alexander was often expected to conform to the traditional ways; but the English education and the entry into the western culture made her a victim of culture clash. Alexander searched for her own identity and self- creation amidst a world that strives to define, identify, and label people. In fact she was being pulled apart by tradition on one side and modernity on the other. Alexander was leading a nomadic life throughout her life: Now she is renowned as a poet, essayist, educationist and the distinguished professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Centre, City University of New York,this 56 year-old defines herself as a woman cracked by multiple migrations. Alexander‘s experiences of crisscrossing over the four continents, the various issues of woman and that of family which she experienced and came across during this cross cultural journeys are the recurring themes of her writings. Alexander‘s fourth novel ―Manhattan Music‖ gives a deeper insight into the impact of westernization on the upcoming generation and its consequences on Indian families both in the homeland and the diaspora. The protagonist of Manhattan Music Sandhya is an assertive and educated woman from an orthodox Christian family from Kerala. As in the traditional way Sandhya‘s parents prepare for their daughter‘s marriage when she finished her studies, but she baffles her parents defying the culturally imposed traditions and conventions. Her colonial education enables her to protest firmly saying, ―If you want me to live as a woman, why educate me? Why not kill me, if you want to dictate my life?‖(26) She was not ready to listen to her mother‘s words, ―Arranged marriages are the best, Sandhya. How could you doubt it? Look at all these messy divorces in our cities!‖(23) The modern girls are not ready to accept marriage as the destination of a girl‘s life‘ and she is not ready to get trained as a ‗good girl‘ for the matrimonial market. Marriage is of secondary importance to them. Being economically independent is the prime aim of the present-day girls. The modern women of India believe marriage as a trap and for them divorce is the only salvation from it. Women approach divorce as though they successfully amputate the unwanted from their life so that they survive. This attitude leads to the decline of the family values in India. This new attitude of women is the basic cause for the change in the family set-up of Indian society. Once the education is over, whether it is a boy or a girl, the preference is to go abroad especially to the West. West becomes so luring to the modern younger generation because it is the dreamland of freedom and opportunities. Sandhya marries Stephen, an American Jew and migrates to the west to make a family. It was a marriage of her choice. This audacious nature of Sandhya in defying her parents and the conventions is a blow to the traditional concept of Indian womanhood. Sandhya‘s migration to the West on a voluntary exile accompanying her husband to his homeland is a turning point of transitions in her life. It was with full excitement she immigrated to the dream-land. She thinks, ―Stephen had married her and brought her to America. She would live here, she would learn to forget‖ (11), but once when she settled in New York, she started experiencing the pains and violence of dislocation. Though she was confident of a good start in the new land, all her expectations went upside down when she became a victim of culture clash. The end- result was the alienation of Sandhya from everything. In the Indian set-up, the girl who is brought in marriage becomes the woman of the house. It is her responsibility to safeguard the welfare of her home. But here Sandhya moves around like a stranger in her own house where she had only her husband and mother-in-law. The house appears to her as a suffocating place. In the homeland usually the newly married girls will not be sent out without male escort, but in this dreamland of freedom Stephen gave her a Green card and told her to take America headlong. A symbol of extreme freedom! Of course it is a situation of extreme freedom which no girl can expect in India; but Sandhya the wife expected her husband to be with her. For Sandhya, Stephen was not available whenever she wished for support in the world where he had brought his lady-love to live her life. In the safe status of a first class citizen in white USA, Stephen couldn‘t understand the anxieties and neurosis of Sandhya, the Indian immigrant. He was busy with his work and other personal matters, and had no time to spend for pleasure-trips with his wife. The extreme freedom and loneliness in the marital life brings Sandhya closer to Rashid, an Egyptian. In the Indian set-up, the close interaction of the family members and the strict supervision of the husband won‘t permit a wife to indulge in an extramarital relationship so easily. But in the land of freedom people look at such affairs as the individual freedom and right. This renewed outlook and freedom are stronger enough to shake the foundation of the tradition-bound family structure of India. There is something remarkable in Indian women; that is their ability to cope. Even though there are a large number of disappointments in marital life, the ability to cope makes a woman tolerate and adjust with all the ills in the family life. This special quality of woman is the main strength behind the successful survival of Indian families. Though Sandhya is from India, the influence of colonial education and the life style of the West have taken away many of her feminine virtues. She becomes indifferent even to take care of Dora, her only child‘s needs. A mother ignoring her maternal role is an unimaginable situation in the Indian society. It is the mother who has to instill values of the culture to the children. Since Dora is an Indo-American child, the mother has greater responsibility in bringing up the child imparting the values of both the cultures. But Dora was unlucky. Most often the child was lonely because her mother was preoccupied with her personal affairs. The difference becomes very obvious when Sosa, Sandhya‘s mother visited them in their New York house. Sosa was startled to see her grandchild sleeping in a temporary make-shift, away from its parents. She poured out her anger at this western practice telling, ―Put them in by themselves now, and they leave you at eighteen. Is that what you really want?‖(144) Keeping away the child even from the very young age onwards is a western practice to make it grow up independently. But no mother from Indian set up can think of such a situation because they are mothers who hold their children closer to their bosoms so that the child will grow up taking the warmth and love of mother. It is this love that makes the child obliged and responsible and loving towards its parents as a bond till the end of their lives. Once during a conversation Sandhya was surprised to hear that Rashid has his own bedroom. She felt really embarrassed to tell him that she never had a bedroom of her own. She feels, ― How could she tell him how odd that would have seemed, cruel even, a young girl put in a room by herself in the large house in India. The parents would have been severely blamed‖.(144) Though this habit sounds quite absurd to an outsider, it shows how cautious and caring are Indian parents about the well-being of their children. Keeping children along with them in the same room involves a lot of sacrifice on the part of the parents. And they are always ready to bear it for their children. As Sosa warns, in the west, children when they grow up to stand on their own feet, they fly away to make their own lives. Parents are no more botherations for them. It is a special feature of the western culture that parents when they become old and helpless, resort to some old-age homes. They have no right to expect love and care from their children because they haven‘t given it. Youngsters are happy with their nuclear families. The human relationships are so thin and brittle there. They have no reason to regret about it because, the elderly helpless parents living in the loveless atmosphere of some shelter homes and the youngsters enjoying life in their nuclear families is a part of their culture. But under the influence of such a shallow tradition, the highly value-based people of India forgetting the worth of their sublime culture is absolutely foolish. Now the Indian people also look at their old and helpless parents as a burden to take care; and so they too find some shelter homes to throw away their parents. Thus the precious presence of parents and grandparents are slowly disappearing from the Indian families. A bane of westernization! This new trend has shattered the foundation of Indian family. Parties and gatherings are common in western life and are very exciting occasions for the Indians. Here also too much freedom degrades the morality of people. Sandhya‘s cousin Chandu‘s outlook about women is given as follows: ―After all, my dear, what are women for but to fill us – by which I mean the male species – with their exquisite fragrances?‖(116) The attitude of men towards woman as a sexual being complimented with the extreme freedom is more than enough to destroy the moral fiber of the social life. Even if the husband or the wife mingles closely with the opposite sex, it is taken as a token of modern civilization labeled as ―forwardness‖. The Indian husband who won‘t allow his wife even to look at any other man than him in the homeland appreciates the wife for her company of men. The Indian wife who is so possessive about her husband in the homeland watches blankly her husband flirting with other women. In the guise of a modern husband and a modern wife they discard their inner feelings and values to merge into the new culture; but they recognize very late that all these gestures of modernity have changed their ‗home‘ into a ‗house‘. Sakhi and Ravi, the Indian couple in America experience this transformation in their life and family. From the warmth and pleasure of family life they came to America to make money. Soon they realized that besides being a land of freedom and opportunity, America is a land of ―making up and breaking up‖ (129) of families. Sakhi and Ravi represent the modern wife and modern husband. Alexander here highlights the value conflict experienced by the modern husband when the modern wife is confronted with the problem of multiplicity of roles she has to perform. Ravi‘s expectations of an ideal wife in Sakhi confronts with the reality of Sakhi the modern wife; and Ravi the modern husband is pulled apart between these two opposite images. The western life style wipes out the virtue of tolerance. For them everything is the individual right: right to love, right to make love, right to make a family, right to break- up a family and so on. When everything is looked upon in terms of rights and money, there is no obligation in the name of love and relationship; so, no sacrifice and no tolerance. Relationships are valued only where there is love, and Indian society is rich in that. Sandhya‘s affair with Rashid was not merely for a bodily pleasure but for her he was peace, shelter and comfort. Whenever a woman‘s expectations are not satisfied in marital life, she will try to look for it outside. A growing awareness of the incompleteness of her marriage with Stephen led Sandhya to a gradual alienation from everything. At the same time, though willing to help, Stephen remained helpless because there had developed a wide gap between them. It is this gap that develops between the husband and wife that acts as one of the main causes of the family break down. Rashid looks at women as a source of pleasure and he prefers variety. When he was fed up with Draupadi, he left a note under the door about his decision to break up. It was with the same ease he broke up with Sandhya. Men like Rashid are always there to trap women like Sandhya, and thus causing many a family break down.. Though Alexander is depicting a family atmosphere in Manhattan, it reflects the family atmosphere common in modern India - an atmosphere of pretended love and smiles between husband and wife. Now-a-days many families which appear as sweet homes or ideal families to the public have the husbands and wives, the life partners living like strangers within the four walls of the house. Rashid appeared to Sandhya as a permanent escape from the torments she was undergoing. For her he was peace and pleasure. A mere glance into Sandhya‘s marital life shows that it is the gap of communication between her and her husband that led her to develop an affair with Rashid.. She becomes so detached from her familial role that ―Sometimes her child seemed part of a life she no longer needed. And it was hard for Sandhya to refigure herself as the one who must coax and cuddle, wash and dry and heal.‖ (141) About Stephen she thinks, ―the distance between her and Stephen grew. They wandered apart, each seemingly content to let the other be. But underneath something boiled, a dark root of rage.‖ The western style of man-woman relationship, that is, a relationship with little value on morality has been imbibed by the Indian families in the diaspora. This trend makes them look at sex as a biological need that has to be satiated as per the need arises. This attitude has wiped out the sanctity of family life in the Indian diaspora. The sanctity and privacy attributed to sex in the Indian tradition has a significant role in the uniqueness of the husband –wife relationship in Indian families. As Vinod Kumar Maheswari says, ―Once man-woman relationship is perverted from within and distorted from outside, there is no end to human perversion‖(Perspectives of Indian English Lierature,136). Sandhya in her dilemma of choice between her husband Stephen and the lover Rashid even thinks ― Why could she not love two men?‖(181) For an Indian wife who is in the image of a ‗pativrita‘ can never dare to have such a perverted thought even in her worst dreams. Though well-educated and with good exposure the modern women lose the morale enjoyed by the women of last generation. The modern trend is to run away from problems. Both men and women have proved their mettle in reaching to the heights of glory; but retaining the glory of family life is becoming an impossible dream to them. Sakhi‘s reflection on marriage in the novel Manhattan Music is very significant. For her ‗marriage meant setting up a new home; but she hated that word ‗home‘ because marriages are now-a-days ‗making-up and breaking-up? Still people got married, in the hope of some permanence. But all around them, those who married were getting divorced.... Perhaps these divorces were just another sign of human beings saying, ―Yes I have some control over my life, yes.‖ A minimal sense of control and the pleasure of beauty, what else was there?‘(131) Today‘s youngsters marry according to their interest and preferences. As Sakhi says they make home soon through marriage. With the same speed they break up with a smiling ―good bye‖. The modern trend towards sex as a biological need to be satiated, marriage as a social necessity and divorce a powerful right of escapism from all the problems are again the indicators of man‘s failure and the crumbling of human values which in turn result in the break-down of family. The incidences like Sandhya‘s attempt to commit suicide, Sakhi,s longings to hold back the warmth of family life instead of the wealth they could make, the eagerness of the immigrants to remain united through celebrations and gatherings and their readiness to inculcate a strong sense of belonging to the homeland and willingness to help each other in the marginalized community emphasize the Indian spirit in the expatriates. All these gestures are again an attempt to refill the mind and the self with what they lost in the new culture. Each Indian is blessed with the remarkable ability to retain his own culture within, irrespective of any influx or influence. Indians can remain as Indians wherever they are. So let the Indians learn to live as an Indian in the diaspora upholding the Indian values.
Works Cited: Alexander, Meena. Manhattan Music: A Novel. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1997. Maheshwari, Vinod Kumar, Perspectives on Indian English Literature, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002. pp.viii, p.136. Dhawan,.R.K,Writers of the Indian Diaspora, New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2001. ―Family Life and Family Values‖, (http://family.jrank.org/pages/859/India- Family-Life-Family-Values.html) 15 Nov 2007.
------
RECONSTRUCTING MOTHERHOOD IN THE FICTIONAL WORKS OF ANITA DESAI : A POSTMODERN ANALYSIS
Gouri Mandapaka
Motherhood is one of the most cherished identities of a woman. Despite different changes in the living patterns of women in recent decades, the prevailing idea of motherhood is still typically Indian. Maternity in most of the narratives is patriarchally defined. Though she is the centre of all activities in the family her multiple roles saturate her as an individual. It is this identity that proves detrimental for her, sometimes due to shortcomings of her own selfish motives and sometimes driven by circumstances. Jasbir Jain in her article on ‗the displacement of the mother and the female relatedness‘ emphasizes on this aspect of motherhood - ―Motherhood is venerated but not fully understood. It is viewed as a completion of a process begun through male initiative and the mother is a figure which merges easily with the background. This conventional pattern of behavior confines women and more specially the mother to domestic roles, looking after the requirements of the family and managing the household affairs at the cost of her own comfort, need and privacy.‖1 The ‗postmodern‘ indicates an end to a specific pattern of life and thereby sets out to challenge age old dogmas and roles which the society or the individual sets out to allocate to the mother. It rather gives the mother a scope to find her roles herself where there are no set patterns or types to which she is forced to belong to. Postmodern gives rise to terms like surrogate mothers and single mothers where the idea of motherhood is not confined to the parameters of matrimony and biology. Under this new frame work of postmodernism she gets an opportunity to cherish this identity of motherhood and construct a new world on her individual terms and conditions. But does this opportunity help her in becoming a better householder? Does this help her to satisfy her unfulfilled desires? Does she now step ahead in building her lost identity or is she making her life more chaotic? These are a few questions that this paper sets out to explore. In most of the earlier novels of Anita Desai which are centered round women are novels which deconstruct the notion of maternity and motherhood in the Indian social and cultural set up in more than one ways. Radha Chahkravarty in an article on ‗figuring the maternal: ―freedom‖ and ―responsibility‖ in Anita Desai‘s novels‘ asserts - ―The figure of the mother emerges in the novel as a sign of multiple possibilities, a trope with both repressive and emancipatory potential.‖ 2 From the tall list of fictional works by Anita Desai I choose to consider: Where shall We go This Summer?, Fasting Feasting and In the Clear light of Day for the present study and analysis of motherhood from a ‗postmodern‘ perspective. In the novel Where Shall We go this Summer? Sita is the protagonist who is married to Raman. She lives in Bombay with her four children and the fifth child yet to be born. She has grown up into a lady who prefers to live an isolated independent life. She however does not seem to cherish the idea of motherhood as she says- ―Children only mean anxiety, concern and pessimism, not happiness, what other women call happiness is just sentimentality.‖(107) This negativity and bitterness that has entered Sita‘s life is a result of a strained childhood where her parents had cared very little for their children. She had never seen her mother and did not know anything about maternal love. This feeling of being left alone looms large in her psyche- ―Ran away? And left us? Sita stood clutching her hair all loose and stamped her foot so that one footprint in the slider was deeper than all the others, one desperate footprint among the oblivious other.‖ (83) Sita decides to leave her children and her husband and wants to escape to Manori Island where she wants to be all alone, away from the busy, chaotic world that surrounds her and also from domesticity. She wishes to freeze the child who is growing in her womb as she does not want the child to come into a world which is disturbing, violent and uncompromising. She feels there is something magical about Manori Island and it will preserve the child in the womb without delivering it. All these are the insecurities and complexities of her own disturbed self where she is unable to connect herself to the world outside. She feels that the island which has something magical will prevent the child from being born. Raman makes all efforts to persuade Sita and tries to convince her to return back to her children who need her more than anybody else. He is worried and scared to know about her plans to live in Manori where medical attention and care will not reach her. He says- ―Any woman- anyone would think you inhuman. You have four children. You have lived comfortably always in my house, you‘ve had no worries .Yet your happiest memories are not of your children or your home but of strangers.‖(147) Sita is a mother who is not forced to fit into the role of a mother. Raman had proved a good partner. But the freedom to take decisions and lead a life of one‘s own choice sometimes proves more disturbing and chaotic as we see in Sita‘s case. When she finally realizes this and reconciles to her present conditions most of her problems seem to get resolved. The insecurities of Sita , her confusions and her anxieties are all indicative of the ― postmodern‖. The novel Clear Light of Day takes us to a similar plain where the problems and anxieties of the postmodern assert themselves in a different way. The idea of motherhood takes a multi dimensional form. Here the mothers do not carry the burdens of child birth or marriage rather they are the mother substitutes or the ‗surrogate mother‘ who shoulder responsibility in the absence of the mother. The concept of motherhood takes a new step forward where the mother is not necessarily a biological mother. In the novel The Clear light of Day Bimla assumes the role of a mother in the Das household where Bimla‘s parents have died and her brother who is expected to be the next caretaker of the family as per the traditional Indian set up has probably deserted them by shifting to Hyderabad after marrying their neighbor Haydar Ali‘s daughter, Tara her younger sister who is seen as a very timid and fragile lady gets an escape from the house and responsibility when she marries Bakul and leaves the country. Bimla is now left all alone to take care of Mira Masi and baba, her mentally retarded brother. As the sole bread winner of the family the entire responsibility rests on her single handed management. Bimla is one of the most fascinating characters which the writer had visualized. The kind of heroism that she conceptualizes in the character of Bim is said in her own words in an interview- ―Bimla was based on the woman I had known, in India women who lived their lives against all odds, made something of their lives. I wanted to celebrate that kind of life that is heroic in my mind. Being an individual sufferer despite all the pressures to bear it and still remain yourself as heroic figure would normally be expected to, this is a form of heroism too, and it doesn‘t get the attention it deserves.‖3 This new idea therefore was successful in doing away with the stereotyped notion of motherhood in the typical patriarchal set up. The novel The Clear Light of Day revolves round this central character Bim. She is a woman who lives life on her own terms and conditions and throughout the novel we see her as a stronger character than her sister who is fragile and timid. Sometimes the conflicts that troubled her show the strains she took as a single woman and still triumphed at the end – ―She too wanted to sleep, she was exhausted by Tara, by Baba, by all of them, loving and not loving them. Understanding and not understanding them. The conflict which rose inside her with every word they spoke every gesture they made had been an enormous strain, she now felt worn out .In spite of exhaustion she feared the night and the dark when she would have to face herself. How would she swim through the ocean and come back again.‖(166) These lines from the text are indicative of the struggle and anguish that Bim has gone through.. In spite of being a woman of great temperament and character the fear of being left all alone and the fear of loneliness bothers her. To be loved and cared are the basic human instincts and even Bimla is in desperate need of it.Mera Maasi comes to her rescue though not willingly. The responsibilities that have been given to her is not by her choice. She is an alcoholic lady who has taken care of these children when their mother was busy attending parties, clubs and playing cards. In her hours of distress and loneliness Mira Maasi is the only person on whom Bim can fall back on. As Radha Chakravarty points out- ―Desai‘s characters are not projected as representatives of a homogeneous category: they testify to the heterogeneity of female experience as the need to recognize the situatedness of all frames of oppression as well as all modes of resistance.‖4 The novel Fasting Feasting is a story of two families – the family of mamma, papa (as referred in the novel), and their children who represent the Indian side of the story and the family of the Patton‘s who represent the American family and society. The Indian family in the novel is a patriarchal one where the father is the only decision maker and all the members have to submit before his authority. His orders are expected to be followed silently. The lives of these two couple in the novel revolve round the newly born baby who is a ―boy‖. The other two children in the family Uma and Aruna now take a marginal place. The girls are instructed by the parents to take care of their baby brother who is named Arun and in fact they are forced to change their priorities as everything else in the world can wait but not the new role that they have to immediately fit to. The roles are interchanged here where the mother shifts her work to her daughter‘s. In fact their education is stopped as now they are needed in the house more. Uma and Aruna are the mother substitutes for their brother Arun. We have another character Mera Maasi in Fasting Feasting who assumes the role of a surrogate mother. In the absence of care and affection Uma finds temporary relief in Mera maasi‘s company. There is a bond that develops between the two. The Patton‘s on the American side of the story lead a very self centered independent life where the mother does not reach anywhere near the parameters of maternity. She leads an independent life of her own. The children suffer of this neglect and carelessness on the part of their parents. Rod her son is a fitness freak and Maeline survives on junk food and has spoilt her health. Arun tries to ask her if he should call her mother when she has collapsed. She had developed acute psychological problems because of loneliness. But she does not ask for her mother and that surprises Arun who has been a pampered child as the darling ‖male child‖ to mumma papa in India. Mrs.Patton realizes the negligence and indifferent attitude towards her family and children when Arun who stays as a paying guest in their house makes her realize the harm that is being caused to her family due to lack of involvement on her front. She emerges out as a better human being after she realizes her roles and responsibilities. In the last section of the novel we see that Melanie has been sent to a rehabilitation centre where she is recuperating from her illness and Mr. Patton who had mostly kept busy, cooking, has started working in a night club to pay his bills. Therefore in almost all of these above discussed cases mother stands as the centre of all activities in the family. Even if it is built on her own terms and condition she will remain lonely and sad if she does not realize her important role in the family. Responsibility towards the family should be a collective effort. Sita, Bimla, Uma and Mrs Patton would have suffered less if they had made the other members realize the need to work collectively. Therefore family is like a system which has to work together. Mother is definitely the central figure but no culture or social system can deprive her of her rights to be loved and cared. Women who understand and learn to keep a balance between independence and responsibility will certainly cherish motherhood.
Works Cited 1. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day, Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1980. 2. Anita Desai, Where Shall We Go this Summer? Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1982. 3. Anita Desai, Fasting Feasting, London: Chatto and Windus, 1990
References 1. Usha Bade, Mother and Mother figures (Jalandhar : ABS publication, 1994), p.53. 2. Radha Chakravarty, ― Figuring the Maternal: ―freedom‖ and ―responsibility‖ in Anita Desai‘s novels‖, Ariel : A Review of international English Literature, 29:2, 1998, p.77. 3. Interviews of Anita Desai. 4. Radha Chakravarty, ― Figuring the Maternal: ―freedom‖ and ―responsibility‖ in Anita Desai‘s novels‖, Ariel : A Review of international English Literature, 29:2, 1998, p. 83
------
MARGINALIZATION: VARIOUS APPROACHES
Jaya Singh
The fact of marginalization has always been a social problem; today it has become a social reality, which cannot be denied. Since the very existence of human beings on earth, man has ever been yearning for power and sovereignty. Initially, man‘s desire was a need, a compulsion for his own survival. Gradually, the urge to overpower all around him, became his obsession. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines the term ―marginalization‖ as an attempt ―to make a group of people unimportant and powerless‖1. Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus views the term as an endeavor ―to make or treat (one) as insignificant‖2. Combined with a strong sense of difference, man‘s attempt to make one powerless and insignificant works on the same grounds of discrimination and disparity as mentioned above, that is, race, class, gender, culture, ethnicity, religion, caste and many others. Generally, the practice of marginalization seems to have incorporated the concept of binary opposition and the very act of marginalization tends to distinguish people into two groups: one is the privileged group and the other is the deprived one. This distinction is made on the ground of certain similarities and dissimilarities that are focused among different groups of persons. Usually, one prefers to promote person of one‘s own group because of these shared attributes; and at the same time the attempt is made on his/her part to discourage, demoralize and thus to discriminate other persons who neither share his/her cultural attributes nor the natural one. Here the two terms,―cultural‖ and ―natural‖ require interpretations. Cultural distinctions are basically imaginative and man constructed. It involves several man made criteria to assess people and a man inherits it through the society and culture he lives in. ―Natural‖, on the other side, involves the attributes (racial, sexual for example) that a person possesses since his birth and that he can neither suppress nor eliminate. One cannot go away with ones natural attributes because they are partly ones biological attributes. While cultural attributes of a person may be marginalized because they are political construction rather than the natural ones. Thus, political construction of people are contrived in such a way as to support certain groups of persons and marginalized the others. Critics and scholars have been preoccupied with question of racial discrimination and the result it produces. Each scholars has approached the issue from a different angle, Ania Loomba is of the view that the marginalizing of vast number of people and their construction as ―background and inferior‖3 depends upon what Abdul Ian Mohamed calls the ―main dream allegory‖4 in which a binary and implacable discursive opposition between races is produced. Another scholar, John Mcleod, views that construction of racial difference as man made which is brought into practice merely as a sort of ―political construct‖ to benefit the interests of the certain groups of people. Macleod maintains: ...all construction of racial difference are based upon human invention and not biological fact. There exist no objective criteria by which human beings can be neatly grouped into separate ‗races‘ each fundamentally different from the other. Racial difference as are best thought of as political constructions, which serve the interests of certain groups of people.5 Macloed further gives the impression that the perceptions of political differences are constructed ―socially for particular purposes.‖ This perception is always open for contestation and change. He ponders over the issue and states that ―Race‖ as a category is the result of the social and historical process, which we can call ―racialization‖: Racism is the ideology that upholds the discrimination against certain people on the grounds of perceived racial difference and claims these constructions of identity are true or natural.6 R.Miles defines racial discrimination in terms of metaphors. However, his definition resembles that of Macloed‘s. He gives the impression that the concept of race acts more as man made against the persons of different race than as an inner fact of nature. He opines that a man is discriminated on account of his skin colour and other cultural and ethnic practices and not on the basis of any difference in organs of his body. Describing race in terms of skin colour, Miles opines that races are generally thought of ...either ‗black‘ or ‗white‘ but never ‗big-eared‘ and ‗small-eared‘. The fact that only certain physical characteristics are signified to define ‗races‘ in specific circumstances indicates that we are investigating not a given, natural division of the world‘s population, but the application of historically and culturally specific meanings to the totality of human psychological variations...races are socially imagined rather than biological realities.7 Colour may be taken to be the prime signifier of racial identity, but the latter is actually shaped by what Ania Loomba calls the ―perceptions of religious, ethical linguistic, national, and sexual and class differences.‖8 Race as a concept receives its meaning contextually and in relation to other social groupings and hierarchies, such as gender and class. Paul Gilory maintains, ―race is a relational concept which does not have fixed represents.‖9 Perceived racial differences, therefore, are transformed into inequalities by colonialist or racist regimes and ideologies in a way that it looks. Racial discrimination real and natural is man invented for the fulfilment of the interests of certain groups of people. Other difference as those of ethnicity, language, culture, class and religion also work as the key concepts of racialization and contribute to marginalize a certain group of people who do not acquire these attributes. These factors, therefore, draw a distinguishing line between people discriminating one as privileged and the other as deprived. ―Ethnicity‖, like race, is a concept that posits a common bond between individuals where race stresses on psychological features as evidences of similarity or dissimilarity between persons, the parameters of ethnicity tend to be a bit wider. In this reference, Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis may be cited: Ethnic groups involve the positing boundaries in relation to who can and who cannot belong according to certain parameters, which are extremely heterogeneous, ranging from the credentials of birth to being born in the right places, conforming to cultural or other symbolic practices, language and very centrally behaving in sexually appropriate ways.10 Ethnicity, therefore, tends to involve a varity of social practices, rituals and traditions in identifying different collective groups and to marginalize them. Ethnic groupings, like other tribal and community groupings, has, reflect Loomba, ―served to both oppress people and traditionalize them‖.11 Here it is noteworthy that race and ethnicity are not synonymous, both can be used as grounds for discrimination. Both of them attempt to harass and marginalize the members of particular ethnic groups or races and declare the disqualified from certain positions of power. Like ethnicity ‗diaspora‘ is another feeling. Robin Cohen tentatively describes diaspora as communities of people living together in one country who ―acknowledge that ―the old country‖- a nation often buried deep in language, religion, custom or folklore- always has some claim on their loyalty and emotions.‖12 The emphasis on collectivity and community here is very important, as is the sense of living in one country but working across time and space to another. Cohen continues that ‗a member‘s adherence to a diasporic community is demonstrated by an acceptance of an in escapable link with their past migration history‘. Difference of gender,‘race‘, class, religion and language (as well as generational differences) make diaspora spaces dynamic and shifting, open to repeated constitution and reconstruction. Diaspora communities are not free from problems. Too often diaspora peoples have been ghettoized and excluded from feeling they belong to the ‗new country‘, and suffered their cultural practices to be mocked and discriminated against. A Class is the aggregate of persons having essentially the same social status in a given society. It is a portion of the community or collection of individuals, standing to each other in the relation of equality and marked off from other portion by accepted or sanctioned standards of inferiority and superiority. In most societies people classify one another into categories and rank from higher to lower. The process of defining and ranking such categories is called social stratification and somewhere this social stratification gives impetus to the fact of marginalization in the society. Economic disparity and class-consciousness are other factors that are related to the concept of race and attempt to subordinate certain groups of people and deprive them from certain positions and power. Both the concepts, like race and ethnicity, divide people in two classes or groups: one is privileged to enjoy all the privileges of life and the other is deprived who is made to renounce and suffer in all the domains of life. These concepts also uphold the sense of society and extend the plight and frustration of the deprived class. Correlating the concept of class distinction to that of racial discrimination, Robert Young points out that ―if, according to Marxism, race should be properly understood as class‖ then class should increasingly be ―thought of in terms of race.‖13 The workings of the class-distinction are the same as that of race. M.H.Abrams sums up that all human consciousness is constructed by an ideology –i.e. the beliefs, values and ways of thinking and feelings through which man perceives. He further reflects: ...the reigning ideology in an era is conceived to be, ultimately, the product of its economic structure and the resulting class-relations a class-interest14 Raman Selden also scrutinizes Marx‘s views and maintains similar position as that of Abram‘s. Selden states: ...all mental (ideological) systems are the products of real social and economic existence. The material interests of the dominant social class determine, individual and collective.15 Thus, what we observe is the fact that class-discrimination and class- consciousness are constituted by economic disparity. It is the difference in capital that makes one master and the other slave, one the ruler and the other ruled, one the privileged and the other deprived. Thus, the completely social structure is grounded by a ―superstructure‖ of which the concurrent socio-conscious system is the ―base‖. Bourgeois ideology is regarded as both producing ―the social and cultural institutions and practices of the present era including religion, morality, philosophy, politics and the legal system, as well as literature and other arts.‖16 Capital, therefore, pervades and captures all that exists in human world. It not only captures things but also the mind of men and presents things in a novel way, with a new perspective that is likely to be accepted as social reality in nothing but the representation of the bourgeois ideology that attempts to suppress and marginalize the proletariat class in all it represents. It is significant to notice here that the concept of racial discrimination concentrates on psychological features as the evidences of similarity and dissimilarity between individuals. Concepts of ethnicity center its attention on a variety of social practices, rituals and tradition in its identification of certain collective groups. Class-distinction on the other side, lays down the roots of its concepts on capitalism and economic disparity. However, all of them appeared to be rather political construction that is made to benefit a certain group of people. It is remarkable that radical discrimination views one‘s skin color; ethnic difference finds one‘s culture and habit intolerable; and class-consciousness treats one no better than the best. Gender disparity is another concept that gives impetus to the fact of marginalization. Since times immemorial, it is women and womanhood, which have been put to test. Very often, it is a woman who has been held responsible for the downfall and corruption of man. It is Eve who is held responsible for Adam‘s sin. In the Ramayana, Sita has to perform ―agnipariksha‖, and Ram is given even more reverence for giving up Sita. Similarly, Cleopatra is generally held responsible for the downfall of Antony. It seems that men are seldom held responsible when both the sexes are in question. It would appear that woman has only one real basis of existence and that is,the promotion and support of men‘s interests. This is the picture of woman, which has emerged from ancient scriptures and even from later literary works. This means that all this involves gender-discrimination and attempts to suppress the fairer sex. Describing the plight and predicament of women because of the several double standards and male biased practices inherited in the society, Virginia Woolf unfolds the condition of women in an androcentric society: Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact, she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell and was the property of her husband.17 The sweetest power that women should posses in society is the sense of one‘s self as what Simone de Beauvoir calls “subject, active, and free.”18 Virginia Woolf maintains, “A woman-must have money and a room of men‘s own ….”19 But this power is incomplete, because a woman loses this freedom when she discovers her own sexuality and finds herself as ―other‖ secondary and man as ―self‖ and primary. It is so because she lives in a patriarchal society – man and woman confront the same experience from the opposite perspectives. A woman‘s “experience includes a different perceptual and emotional life; women do not see things in the same way as men, and have different ideas and feelings...‖20 The discrimination against women in many cultures flows from conviction that sexual freedom from women poses a real threat to all moral and social institutions. Even the most emancipated of men who fight for the cause of women‘s equality in all spheres of life hesitate when they come to the question of sexual equality between man and woman. The concept of another issue leads to the marginalization of women. Juliet Dusinberre has co-related the concept of chastity to the Marxist division of class and commented: At the heart of double standard lay the concept of virginity as a property asset. Virginity is more cherished among the upper class who have more property to dispose of ...chastity in women has never been the shibboleth to the working classes than it is to the upper class.21 However, it is less important that the concept of chastity work more on the upper class than on the lower class, what is noteworthy is the fact that it is always applicable to women and not to men. The concept of chastity, virginity and morality is, in a phallocentric society, more applicable and relevant for women than for men. All this is the consequence of the double standard that a patriarchal society inhabits in all the sphere of life. The practice of dowry is another evil that goes against women‘s interest and attempts to marginalize the weaker sex. Dowry from the bride‘s side has tended to be a fascination for a man in a male dominated society. If a bride does not have a huge dowry with her, she is generally thought to be imperfect. Among several concerns of a man, the bride‘s property has a chief place. Several examples may be cited that a woman for most of the time is compelled to surrender her free will and independent entity before a man (whom she dislikes and thinks unworthy and unsuitable in the role of husband) because her parents do not have a huge amount of dowry to give him. These instances are more frequent in Indian society and Indian novelists in English do seldom miss the chance to mention in their writings the evil of dowry and the problem that it issues for women. Education is another important area in which a woman‘s interests are marginalized. In almost every period of history, there has been a vast disparity between the education given to men and women. In earlier times, the sole aim of women‘s education was to train them ―to preserve their virginity before marriage and their chastity after marriage.‖22 Education defined a woman‘s sphere, placing ―the needle in her hand and the pen or sword in her brothers.‖23 Several contemporary Indo-Anglican novelists like Anita Desai in Fasting, Feasting have focused on this disparity between man and woman. It may often be seen that parents, in a patriarchal society, are much willing to make any sacrifice for the education of their son. However, they do not wish to do even half of it for a girl if she wants education. All her education should be to please and serve man as much as possible. All her learning should aim to delight her husband or the male members of her family. Advocating for the education of women, Castglione maintains: ...more necessary than anything else was chastity so that we could be certain of our children. In consequences it was essential to bring to her every kind of skill and art, and all means possible, to make women remain pure...24 It is remarkable here that Castiglione favours a woman‘s education and does not see, like others, a moral lapse in woman‘s schooling but his focus is also centered on a woman‘s chastity, that is, the chief aim of her education should be to maintain her Chastity. Disparity in opportunity of education attempts to marginalize woman‘s interests. Double standard, therefore, in almost all the field of life encourages gender discrimination. Concepts like- chastity, virginity, morality and several male biased practices like demand of dowry by groom from the side of bride and unequal treatment of women are important issues that marginalize the weaker sex. A woman‘s Voice is suppressed in all the domains of life and she is cornered and ill-treated because of her gender. Many critics focused on gender concept in different ways. Critic like Aschroft Griffith and Tiffin defines Subaltern as someone who is of ―inferior rank. It refers to those groups in society which are subjected to the hegemony of the ruling classes.‖25 Subaltern classes may also comprise ―group (which one) denied access to hegemonic power‖.26 It was G.C.Spivak who used the term ‗Subaltern‘ for the first time to refer to those women who are supposed to be deprived of certain privileges. In subaltern studies, this term is used as ―a name for the general attributes of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age and gender‖27 In Indian context subalternity will be scrutinized in form of the Indian female by the hegemonic ruling of the Indian male. Kate Millett used the term ‗patriarchy‘ to describe ―the cause of women‘s oppression‖28 M.H.Abrams defines the term patriarchy which ―is male centered and controlled and is organized in such a way as to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economical, social, legal and artistic‖29 John Macleod also defines patriarchy as ―systems- political, material and imaginative- which invest power in men and marginalization of women.‖30 Thus, like racial discrimination, class-distinction, difference in ethnicity and culture, gender disparity also attempts to encourage the fact of marginalization and discriminates half of the human race as inferior and imperfect. Like class-discrimination, casteism is a factor that uplifts the problem of marginalization. Casteism discriminates certain groups on the ground of caste. As the sense of class-consciousness distinguishes people between upper class and lower class, casteism makes distinction between people as forward caste and backward caste. A poisonous seed affects most of the people. It spreads its seeds into the heart of people and captures their minds. It generates a feeling in the people‘s mind and encourages them to discriminate other people who do not belong to their community or caste. Hence, it encourages the construction of certain groupings, which ensues people to hate and marginalize other group of people. The evil of untouchability which is so pervading in our society is the off spring of the feeling of casteism. Today, a man from a forward caste does not appear to possess humanity and fraternity for a person belonging to a backward caste. Nor does a backward person seem to have a positive thinking for a man who comes from a forward caste. The distinction is not found between these two groups. However, there are other divisions also which come under the compass of casteism. Those are schedule caste and schedule tribe. Each group seems to prefer the persons of his own community and shows disgust for others. As a result, there has emerged a new kind of literature that is called ―Dalit Literature.‖ Dalit literature focuses on the plight and frustration of the dalits, which are backward castes or deprived people. It views the dalits as discriminated and under privileged. It demonstrates them as the victims of several misconceptions surviving on the whims of the privileged people. Backward people, for instance, are not allowed to enjoy privileges of society or to participate in any ceremony or gathering with the upper-strata people on equal terms. They are discriminated and marginalized as untouchables; and thus, are deprived from certain opportunities and privileges of the society. In contemporary Indian novels in English, writers of regional literature, show a special inclination towards the theme of marginalization. They appear to have demonstrated the problem of marginalization in all the ways and forms it approaches man.
References 1. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman Corpus Network, New Edition, P.874. 2. Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, ed. Julia Elliott with Anne Knight and Chris Cowley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) P.458. 3. Ania Loomba, ―Colonial and Postcolonial Identities‖, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (NewYork: Routhledge, 1998), P.104 4. Abdul Ian Mohamed, ―The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature‖, Critical Inquiry,12. (1985), P.60 5. John Macleod, ―The Nation in Question‖, Beginning Postcolonialism (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), P.110 6. Ibid, PP.110-111 7. R.Miles, Racism (London: Routhledge, 1989), P.76 8. Ania Loomba, P.121 9. Paul Gilory, ―Urban Social Movements, Race and Community‖, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, eds. P. William and L.Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.409 10. F Anthias and N.Y.Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle (New York: Routhledge, 1992),P.4 11. Ania Loomba, P.122 12. Robin Cohen, Global Diaspora: An Introduction(UCL, Press,1997)P.9 13. Robert Young, Colour Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routhledge, 1995), P.96 14. M.H.Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms,7 Edition, (Singapore: Harcourt College Publication, 2001) P.148 15. Raman Selden, ―Marxist Theories‖, A Reader‟s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Britain: Harvester Press, 1985), PP.23-24 16. M.H.Abrams, p.148 17. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One‟s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), P.66 18. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans-& ed. H.M.Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 1949), P.314 19. Virginia Woolf, P.6 20. Raman Sheldon, ―Feminist Criticism‖,P.130 21. Juliet Dusinberre, ―The Idea of Chastity‖,Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London Macmillan Press Ltd, 1975), P.15 22. Swarup Singh, ―The Double Standard in Shakespeare and Related Essays (Delhi: Konark Publication Pvt. Ltd, 1988), 67. 23. Juliet Dusinberre, P.200 24. Baldesar Castiglone, The Book of Courti (Canada: Penguin, Books Ltd.1976), PP.195-96
25. B. Griffiths Ashcroft and H.G. Tiffins, Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies, LondonRouthledge, 1998, P.36 26. Ibid, P.37 27. Ibid, P.38 28. Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (Virago, London, 1997) 29. M.H.Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Singapore: Henle,1999), P. 86 30. John Macleod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester University Press, New York,2000,P.175
------
THE FICTIONAL REPRESENTATION OF NAKED REALITY: A READING OF MIDNIGHT‟S CHILDREN AND THE WHITE TIGER
Dr.Kalikinkar Pattanayak
Reality is an enigma; it has many facets. Be it temporal or contemporary or transcendental, reality always captures the imagination of the creative writers. Fiction is the most popular form of literature in our times because the mode of expression is narrative. Life is a multi-coloured glass; it is transitory but the beauty and mystery of life have always baffled. Writing fiction is more than an imitative art; a good writer of fiction displays originality in conception, perception and presentation of things. He is an explorer and comparatively in a better position than a poet to narrate incidents that compose life which always defies definition and demands narration. In the fictional world the novelist can exclaim ‗what a piece of work is Man‘! In the closing decades of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century life has been so mechanical, complex, restless that it is a tough task on the part of the novelist to choose language in order to picture contemporary reality. W.B.Yeats makes a befitting proposition that there is ‗more enterprise in walking naked‘; a comparative study of Midnight‟s Children and The White Tiger reveals that both Rushdie and Adiga have displayed great enterprise in capturing and picturing the naked reality of our times. Midnight‟s Children has been much read more criticized but all the criticisms are based upon the fact that Rushdie has unique ability to combine facts with fiction; in his fictional world fantasy plays a major role. Sunday Times reviews it as huge, vital, engrossing…in all senses a fantastic book. New York Times writes that Midnight‟s Children sounds like a ‗continent finding its voice‘; the Literary Map of India has been redrawn. Rushdie has a sense of history which reveals itself in between the lines of the fiction. Adiga‘s case is slightly different; he is much worried by corruption, degeneration of human values, drawbacks of human systems of our times; he doesn‘t intend to focus on the course of history. After reading the fiction Pankaj Mishra writes that with remorselessly and delightfully mordant wit The White Tiger anatomises the fantastic cravings of the rich; it evokes too with startling accuracy and tenderness the no less desperate struggles of the deprived. Mishra enters into the world of the fantasy in the novel in order to grasp the reality. Thus in both the novels fantasy is not marginalised; the novelists are more than the imitators of reality. They are the observers of human situation and the painters of reality which is kaleidoscopic. As the writers of fiction they are inimitable if the poet in Rushdie bursts out at times; the satirist in Adiga comes out frequently. This paper has been divided into four sections; the Introductory section introduces the fictional world of the novel of these two popular booker prize winners which is the main motive behind the writing; the second section traces the contemporary reality in the fictional world of Midnight‟s Children; it highlights magic realism in a nutshell; the third section throws light upon the fictional mode of narration in The White Tiger which pictures the dark India; in the concluding section a comparative study of the fictional representation of reality as presented in both the novels is made. II Midnight‟s Children(1981) is a magnificent book because the hero of the novel Saleem Sinai is a fantastic personality; his life is a whirlwind of triumphs and disasters that mirror the course of modern India. Born at the stroke of midnight on 15th August 1947 Sinai emerges as the right person to predict the course of Independent India. The infant Sinai is celebrated in the press because the time of his birth coincides with the birth of free India. This birth is fateful and it connects him with the birth of one thousand other Midnight‟s Children-all born in the initial hour of the birth of our nation. But this freedom is a curse as well as a blessing. The novel ends with prophetic remark: […]because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight‘s children to be both masters and victims of their time, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.(M.C..647) Rushdie prophesizes that the citizens of free India will lose privacy in life and live restless and tension-ridden lives. Peace which is the ultimate goal of life will be an anathema for them. All things beautiful grow in privacy and once privacy is forsaken life is miserable. The explosion of population adds to this misery. Rushdie‘s pronouncement is suggestive; he understands the pulse of time and pictures the reality in appropriate language. Rushdie‘s narration reminds a sensitive reader of Dipesh Chakrabarty‘s sense of Indian history in the post colonial phase: […]Indian history is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate a subaltern subject positions in the name of this history.(―Postcoloniality‖223) Rushdie gives the befitting pictures of India in the postcolonial phase. He writes of the common, the under privileged and the marginalized. He can‘t rule out the impact of the Europeans on our culture: In India, we‘ve always been vulnerable to Europeans…Evie had only been with us a matter of weeks, and already I was being sucked into a grotesque mimicry of European literature. (We had done Cyrano, in a simplified version, at school; I had also read the Classics Illustrared comic book).Perhaps it would be fair to say that Europe repeats itself, in India, as farce…Evie was American. Same thing.(M.C.256) Truly Someshwar Sati remarks about the novel that Rushdie indeed seems to be ‗turning white‘(M.C.478), a disease that leaks wholesale into his fiction(Focus India:143). Rushdie‘s narration of postcolonial degeneration reminds the reader of Edward Said who talks about ―dreadful secondariness of some peoples and cultures‖(Critical Enquiry:207). In the Rushdie‘s vision the native Indian culture is secondary; European influence upon the citizens of modern India, especially in metropolises is primary. The quest for identity is the theme of the master pieces of literature in modern and post modern times. In the fictional world of Midnight‟s Children. Saleem Sinai, the hero searches for meaning: I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning-Yes, meaning-something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity(M.C.9). A deep sense of ambivalence: the search for meaning and experiencing meaninglessness resides at the heart of the fiction. The novel pictures the absence of fulfillment-the fulfillment of meaning in life. The novelist is impelled to picture absurdity, perhaps the absurdity, the unpredictability is the reality. The novel frequently returns to the key political figure of India-Indira Gandhi. But the identification of India with Indira-the leader with the nation is a mockery of democracy. The novelist tends to link nationalism with fascism. Rushdie uses the term widow for Indira Gandhi which reflects his dislike for authoritarianism. He notices the gap between promises and fulfillment. He writes that ―thousand and one marvelous promises of a luminous midnight‖ (438) seem to crumble under the weight of the grim realization ―that the nearly thirty-one year old dream of freedom is no longer what it was‖ ( M.C.457). Thus Rushdie is a critic of degenerated democracy which is off the people, buy the people and faraway from the people. He also focuses on evils of yellow, blue and red journalism. He writes: Divorce between news and reality: newspapers quoted foreign economists- PAKISTAN A MODEL FOR EMERGING NATIONS-while peasants (unreported) cursed the so-called ‗green revolution‘, claiming that most of the newly-drilled water-wells had been useless, poisoned, and in the wrong places anyway; while editorials praised the probity of the nation‘s leadership, rumours, thick as flies, mentioned Swiss bank accounts and the new American motor-cars of the president‘s son. The Karachi Dawn spoke of another dawn-GOOD INDO-PAK RELATIONS JUST AROUND THE CORNER? –but, in the Rann of Kutch, yet another inadequate son was discovering a different story( M.C.464) The novelist here, exposes the exaggeration and distortion of news; reality is somewhat different from the news that is cast. Here one gets reminded of G.K.Chesterton That it is typical human weakness to exaggerate and romanticize thing; the journalist does it to a great extent because it is he who interprets reality before the public. The language of journalism needs to be catchy and the journalist in the core of his heart longs to see the newspaper selling like hot cakes and the news he reports to be hot. Rushdie is a muslim but he never intends to appreciate what muslim country does. His tone is satirical. As a novelist he wants to entertain and instruct the readers. Here is a passage on Pakistan, the land of muslims: In Pakistan, the land of submission, the home of purity, I watched the transformation of Monkey-into-Singer, and fetched bread, and fell in love; it was a woman, Tali Bibi, who told me the truth about myself. And in the heart of my inner darkness, I turned to the Puffias, and was only narrowly saved from the threat of a golden – dentured bride (M.C.567). Rushdie probes deep into the darkness of heart; heart is the seat of wisdom if it is enlightened. The novelist doesn‘t experience it in Pakistan. He sarcastically calls it the home of purity. He is a revolutionary and a revolutionary doesn‘t accept the conformity to the existing system. Thus in the fictional world of Midnight‟s Children Rushdie pictures the stark reality-the degeneration of democratic norms and human values in India. He is not a religious writer but a painter of human emotions; hence he doesn‘t portray Pakistan in bright light. No wonder such a writer would dare to write Satanic Verses. What is the weapon with the novelist is satire which is brilliant because he is gifted with sparkling wit. The major concern with the novelist is the titillation of the intellect rather than senses of the readers. He is a literary genius because every word he uses has beauty for the readers who like to explore the skull beneath the skin III Arvind Adiga‘s The White Tiger which bags the Booker prize (2008) is written in an epistolary form. The novel is in a series of letters written by Balram Halwai to the Chinese Premier, Wen jiabao. The novelist is of the opinion that China is a freedom- loving country and the future of the world ―lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage and drug abuse (W.T.5-6).For Adiga the yellow people are the models not the whites. But he entitles the novel as The White Tiger not the yellow tiger. The reason is not far to seek. Balram the hero of the fiction narrates the tale corruption, bribery, murder, theft, exploitation – a tale to influence the common Indians and get things done in present times. The novelist is a pragmatist; he is not a moralist. He reflects on contemporary reality. When the hero was a school going student he was anointed by the school inspector as the white tiger. The dialogue between the inspector and Balram is interesting and thought provoking: ‗You, young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots. In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals- the creature that comes along only once in a generation?‘ I thought about it and said: ‗The white tiger‘ ‗That‘s what you are, in this jungle(W.T.35). The inspector calls the school in which Balram studies as jungle because it was he Balram alone could read and write while other mates failed inspector‘s reply was to Balram‘s glorification of his own land: ‗We live in a glorious land .The Lord Buddha received his enlightenment in this land.The River Ganga gives life to our plants and our animals and our people. We are grateful to God that we are born in this land‘(WT 34). The inspector highlights the India of Darkness but Balram sheds light upon the India of Light; the former refers to the present but the latter, to the past. Michel Portillio, the head of the jury of the prestigious Booker, calls it a work that shows ―the dark side of India-a new territory‖(Sunday Times of India, Oct 19, 2008). Adiga has undoubtedly exposed the rot in the three pillars of India of her times: democracy entrepreneurship, judicial system. The choice of the places in the novel is quite significant: Bangalore, Hyderabad-the silicon valley of the sub continent and in abject contrast, the village Laxmangarh in Bihar, the most neglected corner of the country. The novelist talks about the ‗Men with Big Bellies‘, the shrewd entrepreneurs and the ‗Men with small Bellies‘, the labourers.n Thus Adiga makes the subalterns reveal their life-styles. The reason that he gives why our country is lagging behind is ‗the fucked-up system called parliamentary democracy‘(WT 156). Here one gets reminded of Kiran Desai who hits hard on this corrupt democratic system.‘Our, parliament is made of thieves, each one answerable to the Prime Minister, who is the biggest thief of them all ‗(Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, 20). In this fiction, Adiga champions the cause of the subalterns whom Marx would call ‗havenots‘ and the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, calls ‗economically dispossessed.‘ Hence Balram the son of a rickshaw puller turns entrepreneur at one stage of life and reveals his ‗rags to riches‘ story. Balram the existentialist believes that existence precedes essence. Hence he tells: All I wanted was a chance to be man-and for that, one murder was enough (WT 318). The hero turns murderer and becomes successful; he is the white tiger in the way Adiga visualizes because he doesn‘t die in the way Shakespearean Macbeth dies. The novel ends with the success of the white tiger- a servant turns boss because of his intelligence which works like a prostitute. The distinction between Shakespearean times and our times is clear: in the Elizabethan age murder could evoke condemnation and be out but in our times murder by a shrewd man can be used for rising in the ladder of social success. Balram becomes Ashok Sharma the boss-the change of name is significant. Shakespeare questions what is in a name? Adiga answers that with the march of technological civilization names acquire significance; the person who changes his name can realize better than anybody else. The names are mysterious. Truly Shruti Sharma and Poonam Arora in their article entitled The Tail of The White Tiger Became ‗Entrepreneurs‘, Citizens ‗Tiger-Food calls this fiction ‗a mystery tale‘(Critical Practice 94). IV M.H.Abrams quotes Northrop Frye in order to explain fiction. He views that the writer of the fiction ‗doesn‘t attempt to create real people so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes‘(GLT 62). Rushdie‘s Saleem Sinai and Adiga‘s Balram Halwai are stylized figures. Both the literary artists have expanded them into psychological archetypes. Both the heroes experience the agony and ecstasy of human existence. Both of them reveal the failure of democracy in the country they are born. Both of them tell the tales of the under dogs, the under privileged whom the literary critics would love to call the subalterns. Rushdie and Adiga belong to world class writers of our times-Rushdie reveals the India of darkness in Midnight‘s Children as Adiga does in The White Tiger though the style of their writing is different. Rushdie can‘t ignore the influence of the Europeans on Indians whereas Adiga doesn‘t approve of the strength of the whites in our times. Adiga looks upon the Chinese as the models. In this context if Gayatri Spivak is given a choice to read one of the two novels she would prefer The White Tiger. V.S.Naipaul‘s presence is felt in both the novels. Naipaul‘s travelogue An Area of Darkness makes India synonymous with poverty, dirt, corruption, inefficiency, bribery and in a word, the degeneration of human values. Naipaul refers to India as the world‘s largest slum and Indians as ‗a withered race of man‘. Though Rushdie and Adiga don‘t accuse the nation of such charges the under currents are felt by the perceptive readers. The distinction between Naipaul and Adiga is this-Naipaul perceives pervasive darkness in the entire subcontinent whereas Adiga refers to the darkness of the place where his hero is born. Adiga also makes a casual reference to the India of light. The readers of Rushdie and Adiga perceive that the two writers are the product of two cultures: Eastern and Western. Rushdie unconsciously reveals that Western culture is more powerful than the Eastern but Adiga reveals that Eastern culture-that is of Chinese is to be admired because China is a nation of freedom loving people. Rushdie doesn‘t approve of the lifestyles of the residents of India and Pakistan; he is very much critical about the development in these two states. In Theory Aijaz Ahmad comments that ‗Rushdie is simply able to float effortlessly, through a supermarket of packaged and commodified cultures, ready to be consumed(128).The novelist draws upon the literary traditions from both English and Indian cultures and he succeeds in reconciliation. He understands the advantage of ‗mongrelized culture‘. The world of Midnight‟s Children is based upon the philosophy of Heraclitus-there is a unity in the world and that unity results from diversity. Hence Rushdie talks of hybrid culture. A discourse on fictional representation of contemporary reality with reference to the Midnight‟s Children and The White Tiger where India figures necessitates an analysis and application of the views of Edward Said: No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no more than starting-points which, if followed into actual experience for only a moment, are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale…survival in fact is about connections between things; in Eliot‘s phrase, reality can‘t be deprived of the other echoes that inhabit the garden(408). Rushdie deals with the Indians, the independent Indians- the midnight‘s children but he can‘t ignore the influence of the whites upon their mental make-up. Adiga calls the hero of the novel who is every inch an Indian, the white tiger. Adiga dislikes the whites but he prefers the white tiger to be the appropriate metaphor for the hero of his debut novel. Doubtless his hero possesses the demonic or devilish energy and shrewdness of the whites to translate his will into a reality –to be a boss not a servant. The longing of the hero is to ‗have children‘(WT.321)- the instinctive followers. Adiga echoes Rushdie. It is too difficult to question the perversion of will of Adiga‘s hero because he reflects the contemporary reality and is fit to be the hero of the fiction which deserves the Booker prize.
Works Cited Abrams, M. H. A Glossary Of Literary Terms: New York Macmillan, 1970 Adiga, Arvind.The White Tiger. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2008. Ahmad,Aijaz. In Theory: Class, Nations and Literatures. New Delhi: Oxford University press, 1992. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ―Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‗Indian‘past?” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Padmini Mongia. London: Arnold, 1996. Naipaul, V. S. An Area Of Darkness:(U.K: Penguin,2002). Rushdie, Salman. Midnight‟s Children. (1981). London: Picador/ Pan Books, 1982. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993). Sati, Someshwar, ―Trapped in Modernity: Neo-Colonial Constructions of India in Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight‘s Children and The Moor‘s Last Sigh‖, Focus India. Eds. Meenakshi Mukherjee. New Delhi: Pencraft,2010 Shrama Shruti and Arora Poonam, ―The Tail Of The White Tiger: When Tigers Became ‗Entrepreneurs‘, Citizens ‗Tiger-Food‖, Critical Practice. Ed.Avadhesh Kumar Singh. New Delhi: Volume xvi (Annual), 2009, pp. 94-105.
------
CULTURAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN VIDIADHAR SURAJ PRASAD NAIPAUL‟S AN AREA OF DARKNESS
Dr. Pankaja Acharya
A Classic of Modern travel writing An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul‘s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. This novel abounds with Naipaul‘s strikingly original responses to India‘s paralyzing cultural identity and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British Raj. V.S. Naipaul has a genius for crafting the most beautiful stories, part of his genius beauty lies in his acute observatory skills. The issue of cultural consciousness confronting the Indian diaspora has been faithfully portrayed by Naipaul in his Novel. “An Area of Darkness”. In this novel he gives full sway to his cultural consciousness. An Area of Darkness sub-titled as an Experience of India is based on his first visit to his homeland in 1962 and is taken as a personal record of the Trinidadian to see the India of his dreams. He moves from place to place, comes close to persons and different characters of India, closely notes the workings of caste system in India and also observes the various rites and rituals observed by the Indian people. He also moves into the Brahmin society to study the outlook, attitude and the application of their creed and makes several visits to temples to record the performance of rites and rituals there-in. He makes a long stay in Srinagar, goes on a traditional annual pilgrimage to the cave of Amarnath made holy by a 5 ft. high ice-lingam which usually forms there during the summer. And thereafter he makes his own observation. Although the lingam is a symbol of Shiva, for Naipaul it is a symbol of India as he himself records. Here, he also records various views and opinions about the Indian societies, their religion, their caste and creed and their way of living. At the outset, we may probe Naipaul‘s opinion on Brahmanism, as Naipaul himself comes from a Brahmin family. He sees all Hindus equally bound by the cannon of caste whatever be the superficial layer of Westernization and Anglicization. He makes a significant observation on the degeneration of religion exploited by the caste system. While examining the Hindu beliefs and rituals, Naipaul discusses the concepts of Karma, Dharma and Moksha, although he applies these concepts in their most limited senses. He traces the Hindus ‗internalizing of these concepts through his connected study of Indian history, literature and social life. An Area of Darkness reveals that Naipaul forms an impression of India that gives him pain and pleasure particularly because the vision of independent India of his youthful days appears completely shattered from a close angle. Of course he is a more privileged because of his Indian ancestry and experience of Hindu India and yet Naipaul has the sensibility of a Brahmin but not the supporting beliefs, Naipaul‘s writings on India reveals Brahmin sensibility that has been overlaid with a western vision which disturbs him when he observes the real India without the western lens and which thereby, makes Naipaul feel that there is now home for him in India. In fact as Walsh points out, ―There is the fiction of two sides of this nature, Which produce not warmth but despair‖1 In fact, Naipaul‘s vision of India is based, coloured and defined by too much of the western assumption which obviously gives him a feeling of repression rather than attraction for his ancestral homeland. Moreover, as a traveler on his first visit to India he was passing through a very transitional period and was therefore unable to project correct insights into India or is to arrive at the real truth about India. Throughout An Area of Darkness Naipaul reveals himself to be an irritable and hypersensitive traveler and the Amarnath pilgrimage too, is no exception. His skeptical attitude towards the modern Indian Swamis or Sadhus in general, and Gandhiji in particular, have raised great doubts regarding his attitude towards India and have also invited scathing criticism against him. This novel remains a powerful work because of its insights into the personal trauma of one of the most complex of colonial writers. In short, it may be concluded that Naipaul‘s vision of India has projected in An Area of Darkness is based on his western assumption and his views on India too are based on his first encounter with an experience in an Indian society with an eager mind that expects to find too much but actually gets too little. Thus, the novel reveals the authors tormented psyche and the shock he received in India that makes it impossible for him to see India in a dispassionate way although he makes all efforts to study India through a journalist‘s eyes that notes what he feels is important from his point of view. Despite the various controversies that it raises in the mind of Indian reader, the novel however remains a powerful work chiefly for its forceful style and narrative technique. Naipaul spends a much longer time in India, and the impressions of his visit as recorded in An Area of Darkness are journalistic and lack depth in some areas of observation. Bombay was the first city which he visited. For him the natural beauty of Kashmir was a dream which acquired the dimension of reality it invested in giving his travel impressions a perspective. Yet a significant aim of Naipaul‘s first visit to India was to trace his antecedents in his country, which calls for a cultural perspective. Naipaul could cut off his connections with the village but he was not able to uproot his Indian connections altogether as his later visits to this country followed by works that present semi-fictional experiences signify. However he could never establish an Indian identity in spite of his upbringing and ancestry. An early indication in An Area of Darkness is Naipaul‘s horror of being a part of the crowd. As Indian readers can easily see his deep-rooted Brahmanism in An Area of Darkness Naipaul‘s declaration of his non-belief and qualities like a Brahmanic aloofness that verge on condescension and fastidiousness that has become a legend in Naipaul‘s case. Unable to identify himself emotionally with India, the expatriate develops a cleft conscience or, split psyche. Naipaul has always possessed a nostalgic yearning for his religious racial and cultural world as such building his subsequent visits to India over the years; he has acquired a working knowledge of the Indian socio-cultural ethos. Here this paper helps to trace the evolution of the best colonial traveler, from his colonial western outlook and habitat. Naipaul‘s account of India in An Area of Darkness is a sincere attempt to come to terms to the problems of cultural identity. He gave up his search for an Indian cultural identity. He became more responsive to India that he visited in 70s and late 80s. Actually the novel explores his conflictive feelings about his cultural consciousness. Always accurate Naipaul chooses to look at those aspects of India and himself that are not comfortable. He offers, here, some illuminating insights. Through this paper, we see that how he has successfully portrayed alienation, cultural consciousness and cultural identity that a rootless, restless and a luckless person faces in an alien land and this perception of India projects his recognition of values, humanism and intellectual development.
References : 1. William Walsh ; Meeting Extremes ; Journal of Commonwealth Literature, September 1965. 2. Keith Fraser, Worst Journeys ; The Picador Book of Travel. 3. V.S.Naipaul , An Area of Darkness (London Deutsch,1964). 4. Nissim Ezekiel, "Naipaul's India and Mine ,"New Writings in India, Ed.Adil Jussawalla (Harmonds Worth; Penguin,1977). 5. "The Bennet Award,1980," The Hudson Review XXXIII (Autumn 1980). 6. Md.Akhtar J.Khan,V.S Naipaul ,A Critical Study (New Delhi ; Creative Books,1998)P.20-22. 7. R.K Dhawan,The West Indian Fiction(New Delhi ;Prestige Books Ltd.,2000). 8. Dr.Bhaskar A. Shukla; A Critical Study of Post-colonial Literature [Mark Publishers;Jaipur(India),First Edition ,2008].
. ------
BĀULS:THE MYSTIC MINSTRELS OF BENGAL- BUILDING A NEW TOMORROW IN THE REALM OF MUSIC
Ms Sanchita Choudhury
Bāuls, much like the Sufi saints, seek the ultimate truth throughout their lifelong spiritual quest. , orally transmitted by the Bāulsi to reach their destination of the union with the moner mānushii, seems to have inspired this clan for many centuries in the heart of the people of Bengal. Simplicity and discipline guide these minstrels in every sphere of their spiritual life. Bāul philosophy is invariably designed for self introspection- a pursuit for higher understanding of the „self‟; the quest for „self‟ exploration. Their philosophy reaches people through their music, which is the primary medium that reflects their desire to meet their soul mate. Bāuls, who dedicate their lives to music, esoteric practices and meditation, belong to an unorthodox devotional tradition. They are mendicant mystics or „madcaps‟ opposed to institutional practices, rites and customs, scriptures and speculative literature. Belief in caste, idol worship, temple visits and sacred sites play no part in Bāuliyaiii tatwaiv or ideology worship. Instead, they believe that their own body is the temple wherein the cherished Supreme resides. This paper explores the living philosophy of Bāuls manifested in their songs and the conspicuous transformation of both their philosophy and music in the global era. Although some Bāuls are attempting to preserve the traditional form of Bāul music, a liberal infusion of musical elements of „other genres‟ and the intrusion of intercultural elements of modern fusion music seem to have transformed century old traditional Bāul forms. In order to earn mass popularity instead of seeking feudal or state patronage, Bāul singers seem to be willing to make compromises with their traditional art form and follow contemporary popular musical trends. Contemporary music makers, both individual and members of music bands, are found to be experimenting with Bāul songs to build a platform of homogeneous musical creation out of heterogeneous musical aspects. Conventional Bāul tenets are predicated on defying social structures and valorizing ventures in the terrain of the imagination and spontaneous creation that result out of one‟s self-realisation.
A Bāul is conventionally known for its captivating music, performance and enigmatic life style. It is a sect, a philosophy and a folk music of Bengal. The follower of the Bāul philosophy is a Bāul himself. In this paper, I shall bring to light the essence of Bāul philosophy, their historical background in short, their ‗otherness‘ in the society apart from this partial understanding about them and most importantly their onward journey towards a new tomorrow through their music. Although a spiritual seeker, a Bāul is quite often unaware of the subtlety and nuances of their own philosophy. He is most often not very conversant with the written texts. A Bāul‘s pursuit for higher truth is in terms of realizations through the spiritual practices instead of the usual conceptualization of the theoretical tenets. The simple ways of understanding and conceptualizing profound thoughts are manifested through Bāul songs that are most often composed spontaneously as an outburst of intoxicating emotions. Bāul is a vagabond, mendicant, iconoclastic folk sect of Bengal. Etymologically, the word ‗Bāul‘ resonates with the Sanskrit word ‗vāyu‟, or ‗bāyu‟ in Bāngla that means air. (Tagore 188)v ‗Bāul‘ is a synonym of the word ‗byakula‟ or over anxious, and ‗ākul‟, which denotes one who is over anxious. However, Shashibhushan Das Gupta is of the view that the word ‗Bāul‘ can be derived in three ways: 1. From the Sanskrit word vātula, which means ‗infected with wind disease‘. 2. From the Sanskrit word vyākula, which means irresistible or over anxious. 3. From the Arabic word āuliyā, this means friend or devotee (83-84). With the Bāuls being associated with Islam in some ways, there is no reason etymologically, to ignore this third possibility. Charles Capwell in The Music of the Bāuls of Bengal states, ―They are the products of the cross current of several forces- Tāntric or Sahajiyā Buddhism, Vaishnava- Sahajiyā and Indo-Persian Sufism.‖ The Bāul, as an independent sect, has been influenced by several faiths and series of cults like Buddhist Tāntricism, Brahmanic Tāntricism, Vaishnava- Sahajiyā and Sufi-ism. Researchers and eminent scholars like Bhattacharya (1364 B. S), Das Gupta (1962), Dimock (1966) and Chakrabortee (1980) have illustrated and exhaustively elaborated this aspect in the form of textual analysis in their respective books. Dimock comments, ―…the Bāuls are fitting hybrids, the Vaishnava, Sahajiyā, and Sufi strains yield beauty, sympathy, and strength. From the Vaishnavas, and from the Sufis, come the Bāul vision of the warmth and humanness and love of God. From the Sahajiyās come their convictions of His compelling immediacy‖ (189). In Obscure Religious Cults, Shashibhushan Das Gupta, while describing their religious philosophy, depicts one of the important features of Bāuls. He points out that those who have come from a Hindu background were highly influenced by Vaishnavism and those of Islam brought with them many Sufi distinctiveness, although their ultimate goal remains the same- ‗mystic conception of divine love‘. By defying established faiths and religions; society and social strictures; this sect defines its own identity. This is why he points out that in general they are identified as ―…somewhat strange people, peculiar in their customs, habits and practices.‖(160-63) Bāul philosophy questions the essentialist notions of Islam and Hinduism. Both from the textual and contextual evidences it appears that they are very unconventional in their social and religious behaviour, and prefer to live independently. The idea of human beings differentiated on the basis of caste and beliefs, torments a pensive Bāul. Lālon Shāhi or Lālon Shāi sings, ―Lālon bole jāter ki roop, dekhlāmnā ei nojore‖ (Lālon says I fail to see how a caste looks like). Rabindranath Tagore, in Religion of Man, covers the wide spectrum of Bāul philosophy- its musical cultures and life style that embraces universal aspect of human religion. He vividly delineates the aesthetic expression of the people through music and poetry too, ―……….What struck me in this simple song was a religious expression that was neither grossly concrete, full of crude details, nor metaphysical in its rarefied transcendentalism………..It spoke of an intense yearning of the heart for the Divine which is in Man and not in the temple, or scriptures, in images and symbols.‖(110) Jāhan, a Bāul, when questioned by researcher Sudhir Chakrabarti regarding their apathy towards social and religious institution, he bursts out in remonstration, spontaneously singing- ―Bāmun bole bhinno jāti/ Srishti ki koren prakriti? / Tobe keno jātir bojjāti koro ekhon bhāi……….Bedānte āche kothāy āmarā dekhi nāi.‖(Brahmins claim themselves to be a different caste/ are they not created by prakritivi? / Then O brother, why are you doing mischief in the name of caste? /…. We have never evinced all these in the Vedāntavii.). According to the Bāuls, human beings cannot be differentiated based on caste, or confined to particular human-made social boundaries. Bāuls are vagabonds who lead and live their life valorizing human birth and human identity. Ādi kavi Chandidāsviii sings, ―Shobār upore mānush satya, tāhār upore nāi‖ (The ultimate truth is human being, and none else is above them). This is one of the strong reasons behind their social ostracism. The society that differentiated human beings on the basis of their faith and lineage, could not accept the magnanimous humanism of the Bāuls. Earlier Bāuls were found over several districts of greater Bengal ix---Birbhum, Malda, Bankura, Midnapur in West Bengal and Kushtia, Meherpur, Chuadanga, Pabna, Jessore, Faridpur, Jhenidah in Bangladesh. These days, however, they have expanded over many more districts of Bengal, India and abroad. Ideally, Bāuls settle far from mainstream society. But, unlike their predecessors, contemporary Bāuls prefer suburban locales to rustic fringes. Sanyāsix Bāuls, especially reside in ākhadāsxi or āshramxii situated away from the social habitat. Bāul philosophy emphasizes the awakening of the moner mānush xiii through renunciation and discipline. A true Bāul stays miles away from material accumulations and possessions like land, name and fame, pride, ego and alike. According to this philosophy, accumulation of material possessions strengthens the urge to achieve ‗more‘ thereby derailing the sādhakaxiv from the track that leads to his/her goal. The path of realizing the moner mānush leads to a plane of transcendentalism. It is therefore beyond the reach of a bhogixv. Living an itinerant life is an inevitable necessity for a Bāul in quest of his inner soul. As a spiritual seeker, a Bāul‘s way of living is instinctively simple, ascetic, vagabond and not premeditated. Even today Bāuls are seen singing and begging from door to door, in public transports like buses and local trains, in public places like cultural or heritage parks, melāxvi or machchaba xvii . In an interview with Parvathy Bāul, she told me that during her ‗Bāulhood‘ days, she used to beg in local trains along with her guru māxviii for alms. In order to lead a simple life like a true Bāul, she had to renounce all materialistic benefits including the comfort of a bed in order to surrender herself at the feet of the Supreme. Many reputed Bāuls singers like Purna Dās Bāul, Kārtik Dās Bāul and Goshto Gopāl Dās began their spiritual journey from ‗something‘ to ‗nothing‘, and eventually be spotted by connoisseurs of music while begging in local trains and localities. Amidst the serious hurdles to establishing their identity as a clan, Bāuls strived hard to retain their simple living style to finally unite with the Supreme. Their state of ‗otherness‘ remained ingrained in them eventually consigning the Bāuls to the fringes of the society. Their practices and religious performances were ostracized in spite of their indifference towards immediate social events. However, they continued to be seekers of the eternal bliss through their distinct path of mysticism that finally leads to muktixix and the final union with the inner soul or the moner mānush. Longing for the moner mānush actually evolves from manqué or ‗lack‘ in Jacques Lacan‘s expression. It is the initial identity crisis due to social castration that drives a Bāul desperately towards the fulfillment, that is, realization of the moner mānush. Bāuls are known to common people through their enigmatic, lively and bewitching songs that are the index of their yearning heart in look for their moner mānush. Their lyrics exude an authentic essence of mysticism, philanthropic philosophy and symbolic overtone, although simplicity in the text apparently baffles the listeners many a time. Chandidās encapsulates the essence of his feelings when he sings, ―Ghar kainu bāhir/ Bāhir kainu ghar/ Par kainu āpon/ Āpon kainu par‖ (I have made the world my niche/ And my home the world, / I have made ‗others‘ my own people, / And my own people as ‗others‘). Rāj Krishna Khyāpā, an eminent Bāul singer, mocks at the world divided into castes and sects. He says, ―Yābat uchcha nich bichār/ Kara tābat bhrānti tomār/ Tattva jnāne sab ekākār…” (So long as you judge people in terms of high and low, you are deluded; all are the same to one who knows reality). Bāul songs, simple in theme and words but exuding a subtle and an enigmatic essence through sporadic use of philosophical metaphors form an important genre of folk music in Bengal. These songs are now popular not only outside West Bengal or Bangladesh but also in the Western World and are an important part of the folk- culture industry. Bāul Samrātxx Purna Dās Bāul, in an interview with The Telegraph 5 December 1982, Colour Magazine, said: ―You know, Bob Dylan is a sort of Bāul. And so are the hippies…All over the world we have met Bāuls.‖ The image of Bāuls as Bengali hippies dominates the media and is assiduously fed back to the potential patrons for the sake of popularity of the clan and music by an increasing number of cultural brokers who export Bāul singers to foreign countries like U.S.A, U.K, Japan, France, Italy, Russia and so on. A community that thrives only for the realization of its philosophy- union with The Supreme or the moner mānush, Bāuls win the hearts of people by mesmerizing listeners through their songs. Music, an effortless enigmatic medium of expression, is Bāuls‘ signature and the prime medium of communication with the world. Their traditional media of communication are exchange of ideas through songs, machchabā and melā other than the routine exchange of ideas and creations in the akhadās--- a platform of intermixing within and outside the Bāul society. Bāul songs are however, not merely mimesis of ‗raw‘ emotions. Emotions are rendered and made an integral part of the sādhaka‟s esoteric practices. That is, Bāul music is not solely dependent on emotions. Spontaneity of emotions outburst from a spiritually charged soul. Aristotlexxi believed that music plays a pivotal role in the process of emotional ‗purification‘. Itinerant living style of Bāuls is one of the major reasons to consider music as an integral part of their life and sādhanā xxii . Bāul sādhakas believe that mere emotional renderings do not help transcend the soul. It is one‘s realisation through prescribed sādhana, that one composes music of the soul. That is why a sādhaka sings—―Nā mojile hoyna bhajan,/ pābe kire nirākāre.‖ (Unless one is seasoned as a spiritual seeker devotion cannot keep going, / and one cannot attain the ultimate stage of formless salvation). It is the union of emotion, intelligence, logic and sādhanā that brings out the real essence of the Bāul philosophy, which is also a folk song of Bengal. Itinerant life style of Bāuls and the passion to preserve their indigenous culture are the possible reasons behind the use of accompanying light-weighed instruments like Ektārā, Bāmā, Gābgubi, Nupur, Dotārā; these are the cult-instruments of Bāuls. An Ektārā is a single string musical instrument, which is made of wood, bamboo splits, piece of tanned animal skin and string. One string is attached to a hollow circular box at the bottom on one hand and with the meeting place of two bamboo splits on the other. Fingers of the performer play it. Bāmā is an earthen hollow musical instrument. One side of it is covered by a circular piece of tanned animal skin. It is a percussion accompanied in the rhythmic songs. The singer strikes on the circular skin part by the fist of the left hand to obtain a uniform beat of sound. Gābgubi is made of a wooden hollow box of six inches height with a piece of circular tanned skin attached to the box at the bottom and with a pot of brass metal at the top. In order to produce a jingling sound as a rhythmic accompaniment, Bāuls wear jingling anklets called nupur and dance while performing their songs. Some of the Bāuls, these days, sing to the accompaniment of non-traditional musical instruments like Dotārā, harmonium, flutes and violins etc. However the cult-instruments are used even if the non-traditional instruments are liberally played to make the presentation more gorgeous and indigenous. Postmodern music tends to dissolve structural and cultural criteria eventually giving shape to hybrid musical varieties. Music evolving in this milieu operates on a multitude of levels. On the one hand, it endeavours to retain the aesthetic flavour that captures the mood variations and emotions encompassing a complex amalgam of religious, mythological and temporal references. On the other hand it reflects the pulse of time through progressive improvisation in dynamic form. It is difficult to categorize such musical developments and label them as a particular form. Subjective conclusions drawn, either by common masses or connoisseurs of a particular locale or musical faculty regarding its etymological existence, lead to further complications in the formation of a genre. But the establishment of an independent genre of music depends on the acceptance of people and the test of time. Conceptualising generic identities and relating their importance in musical life, Fabian Holt points out: ―It is …. A tool with which culture industries and national governments regulate the circulation of vast fields of music. It is a major force in canons of educational institutions, cultural hierarchies, and decisions about censorship and funding. The apparatus of corporate music is thoroughly organized in generic and market categories.‖(3) Understanding genres, sub-genres and sub-subgenres with visibly correct connotations leads to getting into the generated web of styles with a temporal sense. Holt says: ―The network of genre can be understood from the perspective that the genre is a constellation of styles connected by a sense of tradition. These aspects distinguish genres from marketing categories and labels because it has a more stable existence in cultures of musical specializations among musicians, listener, critics, pedagogues, and others.‖ (18) The traditional and cultural aspects that pertain to a particular style quite stably for a period of time eventually develop into a genre. However opinions vary from person to person regarding the concept of style and genre. Categories like ‗race records‘, ‗top 40‘, or ‗chill-out music‘ is not understood as genres in Holt‘s model. For that matter Holt refuses to consider ‗mainstream pop‘ as a genre since he thinks it is defined as ex negative and is mainly based on a star culture with its different social context. Similarly veterans in the field of folk music of Bengal, especially Bāul singers, think that random experiments neither do justice to the Bāul philosophy and Bāul music. Nor do these ventures satisfy the definite purpose; these are merely an arbitrary attempt to re-define a form already popular in Bengal. Experiment, practice and performance of Fusion Bāul music in the main stream of music industry have been in vogue since the early nineties. Although exploration in the realm of fusion Bāul music was initiated by Purna Dās Bāul and Bob Dylan way back in 60s and carried forward in the 70s by the pioneers of Bānglā Band ‗Mohiner Ghoraguli‘, its socio-cultural significance has been different at different intervals in time. A section of Bāul singers of the present generation gladly welcome a liberal infusion of musical elements of other streams of music and the member of this group is increasing in number day by day. However, there are a large number of amateur Bāul singers who readily stoop to compromise with the demands in the music market. Gentlemen or bhadralok amateur Bāuls or Non-Bāul folk musicians or rock artistes gladly experiment with Bāul music with a flavour of World music that generates a mixed response. Fusion music and World music are two independent genres, but very few practicing musicians are aware of their technicalities and intricacies that must be understand for a musician to be able to create palatable concoction- Fusion music. Practicing this music with a touch of World music is part of their random experiments. I have come across many such successful artists who have neither a sound grounding in Bāul music nor a basic understanding of Western nor World Music but are regular performers of fusion folk, especially Fusion Bāul. They are, in fact, a big name in the music industry probably due to their public acceptance, especially among bhadralok class and foreign music lovers. Indrajit Dey, a practicing musician of rock and fusion music, claims that world and fusion music are often misinterpreted. He says: ―Every fusion music is a kind of WORLD MUSIC… but every WORLD music is not fusion music.‖ Ashok Ranade points out the difficulty that folk music underwent to establish itself as an independent genre due to the lack of a concrete structure per se, which further hints at the practical impediments and challenges that fusion-folk is facing today to ascertain its status as an independent genre and class. Holt stresses the importance of genre but simultaneously apprehends the limitations of a structured genre. He tells that genres are important as they provide the starting points of the eclectic fusion process, but it is less clear to what extent musical results can still be attached to a genre. He also points out that live performances are usually more eclectic than studio recordings as CDs have to be sold in significant numbers, to this reason, while the producers of music are interested in fusion, their recipients appear to be more interested in purism. (Holt 31) These factors compel us to ponder, rethink and research the status of fusion-Bāul music, which is criticized for being a structure less bohemian experiment instead of possessing musicality. It is yet to be included in the canonized dictionary of music. However, one has to thoughtfully and critically investigate the reason behind the potential claim of this music to an independent genre and not a sub genre of popular music. A fusion package, with a careful infusion of musical pulse effect, hip-hop elements, jazz, blue, psychedelic matrix cannot be marginalized as a sub-genre of a popular music. Established and popular genres frequently contest with emerging or new genres with similar patterns. Many critics are of the view that generic evolution is much like a relay race. But there are times when this analogy fails. Heather Dubrow points out the caveat offered by critics about the transgression and overlapping of genres: ―The image of relay race suggested by some critics for generic evolution is apt in certain cases but not all. While a genre is still living it may compete with others that fill the same functions. Two genres may enjoy the relationship of genre and counter-genre while both are active, with one of the two taking over many elements of the other when it decays.‖ (114) Bewilderment and ambiguity breed complications while determining the status or validity of forms of art. Bāul music and fusion Bāul music are similar in many aspects but intentionally different in certain perspectives. Although fusion Bāul music began its journey as a subset of Bāul music, it claims to be an independent form according to some practicing musicians. Upal Sen Gupta, the lead vocalist of Chandrabindu or Tatai, the bass guitarist, of Athoi, thinks that ‗creation through fusion‘ generates a new concept that captures the authentic essence of time. Bāul music reflects its profundity through words carefully picked to deceive the ignorant and non-initiated masses but still conveys, to some degree, the illusions and truth of life. Almost every contemporary musician has unanimously agreed that it is difficult to experiment with indigenous music, especially with Bāul songs with their subtle composition and typical Bāul gāyaki xxiii . Musical transfusion might be in vogue, but capricious adventure might be dangerous in a sense that it increases the chances of the decontextualisation of a piece of art like Bāul songs without a planned purpose or vision. While discussing this issue with some Bāul singers, I learnt about their anxiety and apprehensions about this ‗bohemian‘ musical journey. Many of them think that Bāul music will live as long as human civilization since the journey that began centuries back cannot end abruptly or deform and stoop to earn a few more years of life. However, musicians like Vikramjeet alias Tuki of Krosswindz, Bonny of Oikyotān, Upal of Chandrabindu, Tatai of Athoi, or music director Indrajeet Dey concur that experiments and improvisations are made not to degrade Bāul music or the inherent profound thoughts in Bāul songs but to attune it with present needs by building a structure on the foundation of traditional Bāul music. Chirag Sutar, while depicting Tanmoy Bose‘s experiments on Bāul music in his article, writes: ―Speaking about what drove him to this music, Bose says, "I could find a connection between Folk, Jazz, and Indian classical music paired with the timeless philosophies of the Bāul music. However, it‘s unfortunate that people are not aware of our indigenous genres.―…. Bāuls constitute both a syncretic religious sect and have a strong musical tradition for spiritual expression… Bose was incited to do this album since his experiments with Bāul music with his band Taal Tantra were well appreciated…. His band Taal Tantra features Andreas Weiser (percussionist), Kai Bruckner (guitar), Max Hughes (bassist), Tilmann Dehnhardt (saxhophone) and Bāul musicians with a dotara and a traditional dhaki. Music aficionados who have attended their performances regard it as one of the best examples of fusion music in recent times. For this album, Bose has collaborated with Bāul musicians namely Lakshman Das Bāul, Krishna Das Bairagya, Kartick Das Bāul and Bangaldesh's popular Bāul singer Anusheh Anadil.‖ Sutar also points out that ―The album is unique for one more reason – the instrumentals are allowed to have their own life as majority of the songs featuring on the album go well beyond seven minutes.‖ A conspicuous development that contests the earlier established conventions is visible. Instruments, which were earlier typecast as accompanying musical tools, are widely played both independently and as accompanying tools. Some indigenous and folk music instruments are modernized and modified to meet with the challenge posed by time. Musicians are extremely excited due to the pervasive revolution, which seems to have demystified earlier perceptions about music and musical technicalities. Stereotypes are no more in vogue; rather the ambitious audience of this millennium finds a meaningful thought in a new garb to be more satisfying. Nandini Guha writes about such musicians in ―New Age Notes‖ xxiv . She begins, ―Ace percussionist Bickram Ghosh was tired of being drowned out by other louder instruments when he was playing in fusion concerts. There was no way his tablāxxv could compete with sounds being produced on stage by his fellow musicians. To get around the problem Ghosh added an instrument called a handsonic- it‘s an electric hand drum- to be played alongside his tablā.‖ Ghosh says: ―I was looking for a punchy, racy sound. So I used the handsonic, which I picked up from the US.‖ Nandini Guha summarises: ―Ghosh and the other musicians are trying to give a new twist to fusion music with the electric versions of their instruments.‖ Musicians like Bikram Ghosh include Rajesh Vaidhya with his electric veena, Prattyush Banerjee with his jyotidhwani, Purbayan Chatterjee and his version of the electric guitar and Snehasis Majumdar with his doubled necked electric mandolin. These modified instruments help produce certain sounds that resonate with time. Prattyush Banerjee says: ―Because of the long sustained notes, I can play the alaap of a Hindustani classical composition better on the electrified instrument. The taan, gamak and tihai also sound better with the electric instruments,‖ Ghosh asserts that he uses the handsonic for the bass guitar tone mostly during fusion concerts. He adds: ―This combination creates a dense groove which, in fact, is the backbone of my sound in albums like Rhythmscape or Electro Classical,‖. Vaidhya seems to be happy with the ‗fast pace‘ that can be easily played in Electro Classical with the help of his modified electric veena. Even a veteran musician like sarod maestro Pandit Tejendra Narayan Majumdar is confident about the modulation made possible through ‗electrified instruments‘ although he is still not very confident about its full-fledged execution of a complete raga. The consequence of this dynamic experimentation is their instant reception by the new generation. This is one of the major reasons why musicians do not hesitate to use electrified instruments in fusion music. On being asked about his recent music album Electro Musicians Classical, Ghosh says: ―I realized sometimes back that a large number of Indians didn‘t attend classical concerts. They missed the familiar sound of pop and rock concerts. This sound was constituted by the electric tonality of instruments and also the grooviness of popular music.‖ Musicians creating Bāul fusions are tempted to create precision, and, therefore, generously use these instruments in their creative musical adventure. This evolving form of Bāul music with heterogeneous musical elements from across the globe poses an inevitable question and raises suspicion and reservations about the validity of such experiments due to unorganized and often whimsical improvisations. The audience or listeners, in general, take pleasure in building a mental frame of a particular genre or form of music they already appreciate, and in order to comprehend that better they carry the mental frame for future reference. They often feel cheated, with some of the impregnable intricacies in the creation, when subjected to performances and shows that do not match with the mental map they happily carry with them. For example, improvisations in ―Dil ki doya hoynā‖ by Paban Das Bāul and experimentations of Athoi, a musical band based in Kolkata, with one of the very popular songs of Lālon Fakir ―Āmār bārir kāche ārshi nogor‖ neither match in a greater sense with that nor do they abide by any integral code of music. In fact, it is difficult to identify ―Āmār bārir kāche ārshi nogor‖ as one of Lālon Fakir‘s songs unless informed in advance. Two popular Bāul songs, ―Nāchite nāchite shundori komolā” by Chandrani of Krosswindz and ―Meye shorbonāshi‖, by Dohār manifest as different musical presentations although both claim to have made a concoction of Bāul music and music of the world around giving it a final form of Bāul fusion music. Musicians are often tempted to add musical flavours liberally from across the world and develop what is called fusion music, and therein lay the objections of listeners who do not find any resemblance between the people and groups/bands making such music. Moreover these changes that do not reflect the essence of the soil only disappoint the listener. Thus, the consequence as evinced till now is that Bāul music is in a state of crisis. In the name of preserving this dying indigenous music of Bengal, that is Bāul music, rich in many aspects, some musicians carelessly, playfully and randomly experiment with its musical characteristics there by giving it a deformed shape. Change is inevitable in any musical genre. Musicians across the world have explored different terrains of music and socio-cultural aspects pertaining to music in order to create new forms or upgraded version of traditional music. Diachronic studies and analyses indicate that a form of music changes over the years and emerges into a new form, sometimes surpassing the existing one. Musicians, who are aware of the profundity of Bāul philosophy and have an in-depth knowledge of Bāul music, can perhaps venture into such experimentation and create a mutant that resonates with the traditional form. Even for a person like Mimlu Sen, who has been traveling, performing and living with the mystic minstrels for decades, this has been a difficult venture. In the Epilogue of her book Bāul Sphere she states her dilemma: ―Should we bend our rhythms to hip-hop and break dance tracks? Continue to explore Mandingue melodies from Mali and jazz rhythms? Take our musical encounters with the fabulous desert musicians of Rajasthan towards an album? How do we cross over the grid of rules and regulations, laws and by-laws which govern copyright, and, in fact, existence itself in Europe? ... Should we drop all this...? Should we go to Bāul country in Birbhum and create a Bāul mahotsava on our newly acquired land in the village of Lohagarh near the forests, which border the Kopai River? Do we abandon our fantastic shuttle between Europe and India? Can we do both?‖(279) in many instances we find that people claim such improvisation as an effect of globalization. But Mimlu Sen, in a different context, admits, ―Instead of drawing our disparate worlds closer together, globalization seems to have had the opposite effect on our lives.‖(278) it is now evident that playful experiments have been deluding people instead of forming a new beginning. These spurious works baffle people to such an extent that they eventually fail to distinguish between authentic and erratic experimentation; between fusion and musical concoction without any definite objective. New experiments and explorations have signaled an accelerated alteration of Bāul music, which seems to have been deeply influenced by the rich tapestry of musical genres in Bengal like the plaintive folk melody, Kirtanxxvi, boatmen songs and many more. However, Bāul songs, as mentioned earlier, are no longer restricted to the region of Bengal or India nor has the process of exploration restricted itself to a geographical periphery. Bāul song, which is traditionally a melismatic solo accompanied by chordophones like ektārā or dotārā and membanophones like khamak, has been sung in a non-traditional and non-stereotypical manner to evoke the flavour of time and importance of the result generated out of musical adventure for the past few decades. Change is envisaged in every aspect of the singing style and mode of presentation of Bāul songs. With an objective to popularize Bāul songs, musicians have opted for fast rhythms. They have preferred fast triplets/couplets or reggae beats to medium paced 4/6 beats or slow 8 beats rhythmic cycle. Some Bāul songs (Bangladeshi Bāul songs especially), which are metrically fluid, non-rhythmic or slow paced melodies with long held notes in the higher octave, have been completely transformed into a rock fusion. Thakte pār ghātāte tumi pārer nāiyā, a slow tempo Bāul song of Bangladesh originally sung in a slow 8 beat rhythmic cycles similar to a typical bhātiyali river/boatman song, has been sung by Khalid Hassan Milu in fast 6 beats rhythmic cycle with occasional improvisations. Another vibrant example is a popular Bāul song Tomāy Hrid majhāre rākhbo chere debona that delineates the ecstasy of the Rādhā Krishna romance in a Kirtan style of singing. Babukishan das Bāul, Paban Das Bāul, Tarak Das Bāul, Satyaki Khyepa Bāul and many other Bāul singers have sung this song for many years. However, a distinct style of presentation cannot be overlooked when music bands of the new millennium like Blue Eyes, Sandhān and others perform the same song many times in a conspicuously different singing style. The acquisition of status in the domain of music is spontaneous and inevitable, although many such nascent musical attempts wither within a course of time. The possibility of acquiring the status of a genre becomes bleak for many musical adventures due to critics and researcher‘s reservations about the status of Bāul fusion music uncommon. In spite of their unstructured patterns, patches and heterogeneity, Bāul bhāvaxxvii cannot be overlooked in most of the new creations. Their apparent or imperceptible dissimilarities should not be suppressed in order to establish a genre/ sub genre or simply a musical status among the masses. In the disorganized musical frame, lies an inordinately musical structure that reverberates with time, that is, they strive to capture the taste of the mass through their musical expedition. Impression of time is inevitable in artistic creations, and hence the present amalgamation in the era of globalization. The rasaxxviii and bhāva emanating from a musical creation determine its intrinsic musical genre in spite of the musical grandeur and heterogeneity. So long as the Bāul bhāva subsists amicably with exotic musical elements, music seems palatable for the mass. The addition of elements of ‗other‘ music destroys the Bāul flavour only when the attempt is desperate and whimsical. Practitioners of fusion music indulge in heterogeneous creations and as a result a musical collage like Bāul fusion generates a homogenous structure within its heterogeneity. Bāul rasa in Bāul-fusion establishes a genre with a different profile. In Indian aesthetics, rasa plays a pivotal role in determining an art form. According to Sneh Pandit: ―An object which does not contain rasa cannot be classed in the category of an art work, and no experience without it can be called aesthetic…. In other words, rasa as a quality of the art object and of the aesthetic consciousness could synthesise both aspects and offer a point of reconciliation.‖ (32) While referring to Bullough‘s concept on identification, she says: ―Identification according to him is the natural state of mind wherein the self is identified with what it feels. The introduction of distance alters this state of identity by filtering the relation between the self and its feeling of its personal character.‖ She further adds: ―The act of identity arises out of the capacity to detach oneself from passive and blind impulses, but it is consequently an independent state of mind, constituted no doubt of the ordinary emotional state but transforming this into a new and different kind of experience.‖ (46) The presence of bhāva in a consistent degree eventually helps in the process of identification of a particular genre in a particular piece. Bikram Ghosh thinks that expert knowledge of musical genres is essential for experimenting with them to create music. A musician must feel the aesthetic necessity to fuse varied musical elements for producing a desired effect. In a particular context he says: ―Fusion can be the most risky form of music. If you don‘t know how to get different genres together aesthetically, you‘ll end up making noise, not music. You should be adequately prepared and equipped,‖.
References
Bhattacharya, Mahendra Nath., ed. Andul Kali Kirtan O Bāul Gitabali. Andul: Taraprasanna Bhattacharya, 1359 (B.S). Capwell, Charles. The Music of the Bāuls of Bengal. Kent Ohio: The Kent State UP, 1986, 34-35, 242. Chakrabartee, Surath Chandra. Bāuls: The Spiritual Vikings. Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1980. Chakrabarty, Sudhir., ed. Gavir Nirjan Pathe. Calcutta: Ananda, 1989. Das Gupta, Shashibhusan. Obscure Religious Cult. Calcutta: Firma KLM. 1946,160- 63. Dimock, Edward C. The Place of the Hidden Moon. Chicago: 1966, 258. Dubrow, Heather. Genre. London: Methuen, 1982. Holt, Fabian. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2007. Pandit, Sneh. ― ‗Rasa‘ as a Principle in Art and Aesthetics‖. An Approach to the Indian Theory of Art and Aesthetic. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1977, 32. Ranade, Ashok D. ―Categories of Music‖. Essays in Indian Ethnomusicology. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.1998, 1-25. Sen, Mimlu. Bāul Sphere. Noida: Random House India, 2009. Sutar, Chirag. ―Tanmoy Bose experiments with Bāul music in new album‖. Editorial News. Radio and Music. Com. 03 Feb 2010 11:13 IST. Web 5 Aug 2010. http://www.radioandmusic.com/content/editorial/news/tanmoy-bose-experiments- with-Bāul-music-new-album Tagore, Rabindranath. The Religion of Man. New Delhi: Rupa, 2005. Web. 5 Aug 2010. http://www.newagemusic.nu/tag/bikram-ghosh. You Tube. Babukishan Dās Bāul. Web. 20Aug 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGjsbGTC_2s You Tube. Sātyaki Khyapa Bāul. Web. 20 Aug 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS5E8-4stZY You Tube. Blue Eyes. Web. 20 Aug 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG0RVk1YTnw&feature=related You Tube. Sandhān. Web. 20 August 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypq- 4hAHPFU&feature=related You Tube. Anushesh. Web. 20 August 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m0wOAMNw8Y&feature=related You Tube. ―Bonde Māyā‖. Jackie. Web. 15 Aug 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqlsWDrsCBY&feature=related YouTube. ― Moder Kothāi Sono- Bonde Māyā‖. Shāmimā Alam Chinu. Web. 15 Aug 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njK65G9PkSM&feature=related YouTube. Paban Dās Bāul. Web. 30 Aug 2010. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:x2b1JMr4ApIJ:www.popmat ters.com/pm/review/128139-paban-das-Bāul-music-of-the-honey- gatherers/+media+Bāul&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in ------
i. Bāul is a vagabond, mendicant, but iconoclastic folk sect who is spread over different districts of greater Bengal, West Bengal and Bangladesh. Bāuls are a clan of mystic minstrels who ideally live on alms and lead an itinerant life. They live a distinct way of life committed to an esoteric religious cult in the social and cultural context of Bengal. ii. The inner self (ātmān) iii. Pertaining to Bāul cult iv. Theory v. The Sanskrit ‗v‘ becomes ‗b‘ in the eastern part of Bihar, Bengal, Assam and Orissa, and, thus, the Sanskrit intervocalic constant is often dissolved. vi. women/nature vii. Upanishad viiiviiiviii. Born in 1408 CE approximately refers to a medieval poet of Bengal who is known for his love peoms on Radha and Krishna and lyrical Srikrishna Kirtan (Songs in praise of Lord Sri Krishna) ix. West Bengal and Bangladesh x. Monk xi. A socio-cultural institution in Bangladesh and Eastern India; spiritual Retreat for some sects xii. A Retreat xiii. The inner soul or self xiv. Spiritual seeker xv. Hedonist; one who seeks material comfort xvi. Fair xvii. Celebration for a spiritual cause xviii. Preceptor xix. Salvation xx. Emperor xxi. ―Aristotle on Aesthetics‖. 1902 Encyclopedia. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IM0cF35EtMsJ:www.1 902encyclopedia.com/A/AES/aesthetics- 09.html+Aristotle+music+emotional+%E2%80%98purification%E2%80%99&c d=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in (Web. 1 Nov 2010). xxii. Spiritual disciplined practice xxiii. Singing style xxiv. Graphiti, The Telegraph, 22 August 2010 xxv. Percussion instrument played in India xxvi. Kirtans are Hindu Vaishnav devotional songs which employ an "improvisatory technique known as akhar (textural elaboration on the existing words of a poem), [which] lengthens the original song into a more complex structure" (Saaduddin 1980:114 xxvii. Emotion xxviii. A particular emotion with its distinct aesthetic quality
NEITHER „WHITE‟ NOR „MALE‟: BLACK WOMEN AND BLACK FEMINISM
Shaista Maseeh
Black Feminist Movement came into being as a response to both the Black Liberation Movement and the Feminist Movement. Its genesis lay in the realization that sexism existed in the Black Liberation Movement and racism in the Women‘s Movement and it was formed to fight the interrelated effects of race, gender and class on black women. Black Women have a history whose effects compelled them to form a Movement of their own. Race and class constitute very important aspects of human life. In case of women, it is not only their sex that determines their position (primary or secondary) and status in society but also their class and race. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards inform that the editors of The Readers Companion to US Women‟s History lists seventeen major types of feminisms based on identity. Black Feminism is one of them. Black Feminism deals with the history and the experiences of black women. The history that began with the transportation of slaves through the Middle Passage and continued through slavery in the US- a most horrible history of brutalities visited on human beings. White Feminists had complained of being barred from the main stage of society, but black women‘s concern was the question of existence itself- of the possibilities of their elimination from the domain of humanity. That‘s why Alice Walker coined and defined the term ‗Womanist‘-to differentiate black women from white feminists. Womanist is derived from ‗womanish‘ that is ―opposite of ―girlish‖ i.e., frivolous and irresponsible.‖ ―A black feminist of colour…Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ―good‖ for one . . . Responsible. In charge. Serious.‖ Also : A woman who loves other women, sexually and /or non-sexually, appreciates and prefers women‘s culture, women‘s emotional flexibility (values tears as a natural counterbalance of laughter), and women‘s strength . . . Committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not separatist except periodically, for health.xxviii To elucidate, womanism in its various meanings and implications was the recognition that feminism had failed to consider the lives of black women. Although a womanist too was one who advocated women‘s rights, womanism implicated the racist and classist face of White Feminism. It did not exclude men realizing their importance both as children and family members. Indeed Womanism understood and acknowledged the bond between man and woman. It was also a recognition of the strength of black women along with their ability to survive a history which was horrifying and sexually extremely exploitative. There have always been differences in the lives of women belonging to various races and classes and these differences will continue. However, if gender is examined in the light of these social divisions and perspectives these differences become visible and clearer. Sandra Harding claims that, ―there are no gender relations per se, but only gender relations as constructed by and between classes, races and cultures.‖xxviii In the case of black women, it was the long history of slavery that impacted and enhanced the difference. It was Sojourner Truth, a black woman and one of the first black feminists to draw attention to the plight of black women. In 1850, in the Women‘s Rights Convention she bared her breasts to prove that she was a woman. It was inconceivable for a white woman to do such a thing but Truth did, since she like all slave women had undergone and faced the extremes of life. She said : Look at me! Look at my arm! . . . I have plowed, and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me- and ain‘t I a woman? I could work as much as any man (when I could get it.) and bear de lash as well- and ain‘t I a woman? I have born five children and I seen ‗em mos all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mothers grief, none but Jesus hear- and ain‘t I a woman? xxviii In this dramatic way she asked how white educated middle class women‘s experience could be similar to the experience of women who had suffered tortures, experienced mental traumas, rape, beatings, who had ‗ plowed‘, ‗planted‘ and ‗borne children‘ like a ‗breeding hog‘. However, in spite of such strong emotions, the fact is that black women could be organized under the banner of Black Feminism only in the second half of the 20th century .But unofficially and informally this instinct of togetherness and sisterhood had always existed in black women. The reason for this togetherness might be found in their past that had taught them to remain united in order to save themselves from being destroyed by the cruel practices of slavery. Due to those two hundred years of slavery, they had learnt to understand instinctively, even in silence, each others‘ pains and fears. In the 1790‘s northern free black women formed a society for mutual relief, self education and the abolition of slavery. In 1816 the Salem Colored Female Religion and Moral Society was formed followed in 1831 by the formation of the female Anti- Slavery Society of Salem. Identity politics in Feminism contributed to the development of Black Feminism as a separate branch. But apart from the diversity of the experiences of the women in the world and the racism in the feminist movement there was another compelling reason for the emergence of the Black Feminist Movement. This was the sexism of black men. Black Men and their Sexism A shared sense of history and oppression bound black women and men with a special connection. During slavery they tried to organize their community in order to lessen the harsh and ugly effects on the family. Free African American women would buy slaves in order to free them. They would often migrate to the North to find jobs to enable them to buy freedom for husbands and children. The secret transportation of slaves that came to be known as the Underground Rail Road provided thousands of slaves the boon of freedom. Harriet Tubman, a fugitive slave learnt about it and got associated. In 1850 she helped her first slave to escape. In September 1850 Tubman was made the official conductor of the Underground Rail Road. She knew all the routes and strategies to flee from the South to freedom. Research indicates that Rochester became the main station for the UGRR with the help of Harriet Tubman. In 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment of the US Constitution enfranchised black men. This obviously brought some bitterness in the relations between black men and women‘s rights activists. But black women rejoiced at this victory of their men. They were not piqued but instead found out ways to be involved with the politics of the country through the men. They attended meetings and discussed and advised men on voting. Throughout the post reconstruction period African American women played a crucial role in the upliftment of their race. Lack of educational opportunities, under- funding of African American schools and segregation were some obstacles they had to contend with. The lynching of black men took on alarming proportions during the post reconstruction period. The Klu Klux Klan spread terror in the black community, by lynching black men, raping black women and burning down black homes. Black women were deeply involved in anti-lynching movements. They campaigned and even met the President. Women like Ida Well Barnett and Mary Church Terrell were major figures in anti-lynching movements. In 1909 the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed and women such as Margaret Bush Wilson, Althea Simmons and Jeanne Fairfax played leading roles in it. In the field of education, women worked towards the integration of segregation in higher education. Educationists such as Autherine Lucy, Ada Sipuel, Edith Jones, Vivian Malone made great efforts to advance black people in higher education. The Civil Rights Movement would not have occurred if Rosa Parks had not had the courage to speak up for her rights. Daisy Bates, Fannie Lou Hammer were equally active in the Civil Rights Movement. All these concerted efforts make it clear that for black women, ―race was the priority issue and it was the issue that initially sparked their feminism.‖xxviii The Black Power Movement grew out of the Civil Rights Movements in the 1960s and early 70s. It was a series of efforts by black Americans to gain control over political and social institutions that affected their lives through the development of Black Nationalism and black separatism in politics, economics and society. The Black Power Movement had under its umbrella a variety of groups, such as the Student Non - Violence Coordination Commitee, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Black Panthers, and the Black Muslims. Bitterness crept into the relations between black men and women during the Black Power Movement. In 1964 when the Black Power Movement was on the rise Stokely Carmichael of the SNCC was asked about the position of women in the SNCC. He said that ―the only the position for women in the SNCC is ―prone‖xxviii. Amiri Baraka, American writer of poetry, drama and music criticism too claimed that ―Nature had made woman submissive she must submit to man‘s creation in order for it to exist.‖xxviii Baraka refused to believe in the equality of men and women and advocated the inequality by referring to nature itself. To him men and women are not complementary; hence, a black man is not for the black woman as she is for her man. Similarly Elridge Cleaver, famous for his book Soul on Ice, too had a misogynist attitude. Black women, on the other hand, continuously tried to understand the frustrations of black men going as far as justifying battering of black women by black men. Artie Seale, a female Black Panther said that ― black men in our community are being castrated . . . black men have to turn to their families for the release of their frustration . . . Black men beat their women because they aren‘t sure who should be blamed for their frustration [because] Black males are made to feel less than a man.‖ xxviii Soon typical gender roles were assigned to black women in the Black Power Movement. Men equated Black Power with black male and machismo that had nothing to do with the women of the race. Civil Rights activist E. Frances White was told to help out in the kitchen while a regional black student society meeting was going on. All this discrimination on the basis of sex was tremendously hurtful and traumatic to women. They felt betrayed because since slavery men and women had stood beside each other and faced their afflictions in unison. When America‘s first black newspaper Freedom‟s Journal published its first edition on May 16th, 1827, in its editorial it wished to ―plead our own cause‖. At that time black women could have hardly foreseen that one day the causes of men and women in the black community would be divided. They had to face constant sexism in the liberation of their own race. Although it was claimed that the Liberation Movement was for the liberation of the whole race, the practical approach was sexist and it prevailed to such an extent that the term ‗liberation‘ was made synonymous with manhood. Commenting on this aspect of the movement Jerry H. Bryant wrote: During the decade or so that Black Power was a provocative force on the American scene, African American imagery was dominated by a heavily male sensibility. Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, George Jackson, Huey Newton, Elridge Cleaver- their language, both visual and linguistic, set the definition of the period. They brought to the climax the view that authentic manhood and heroism were the prime object of the black male‘s search. . . .xxviii It was thought that racism in America was destroying the manhood of the black male, so they were more harmed by it than women. Black women began to feel stifled in a system which did not acknowledged them. The time was ripe for the genesis of a movement that focused on Black Women- the Black Feminist Movement. It is to be noted that not all black women were as patient and compromising as Artie Seale. Some were the true heirs to Sojourner Truth, who on being stopped from speaking in 1851 in the Women‘s Convention had given a fitting reply to men who were speaking of the ―manhood of Christ,‖ and the ―sin of our first mother.‖ Truth said: ―That…man…says women can‘t have as much rights as man, cause Christ wasn‘t a woman. Where did your Christ come from? From God and a Woman! Man had nothing to do with him!‖xxviii. Some refuse to follow men ‗ten paces behind‘. Nikki Giovanni replied: ―If that is what the black man needs, I‘ll never get far enough behind for him . . . I will never walk that slowly.‖xxviii
White Women and their Racism The Feminism of the 1970s and 80s failed to address the more profound problems of black women. Black women too couldn‘t relate to the plight of white women, which was quite different from theirs. To them it was a typically white middle class movement. Frances Beale analyzed the state of affairs in her document ―Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female‖- . . . White women‘s liberation movement is basically middle class. Very few of these women suffer the extreme economic deprivation that most Black Women are subjected to day by day. This is the factor that is most crucial to us. It is not an intellectual persecution alone; it is not an intellectual outburst for us; it is real . . . If the white groups do not realize that they are in fact fighting capitalism and racism, we do not have a common bond. If they do not realize that the reasons for their condition lie in the system and not simply that men get vicarious pleasure out of ―consuming their bodies out of exploitative reasons‖ . . . then we cannot unite with them around common grievances or discuss with these groups in a serious manner because they are irrelevant to the black struggle.xxviii Black women disagreed with the statement ―all women are oppressed‖. According to them race and class have their own effects on the lives of women. Different women undergo different degrees of exploitation and discrimination based on their race and class. Betty Freidan found that she as a ―woman made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover materials, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children . . . lay with her husband . . . she was afraid to ask the silent question-Is this all?‖ xxviii But no aspect of black women‘s history matched the lifestyle and experiences that were mentioned by Freidan. They were simply not among those middle class, college educated housewives. The white women‘s problems could never be theirs. While a white woman would want to leave behind her home for an honorable job, the black woman was already employed as a maid or clerk or babysitter or even a prostitute. She was, unlike the white woman, occupied in works that were tedious and limiting, that never helped her to use her brain- work that reminded her always of her history of slavery because the conditions and environment of the work would be in practical terms not very different from slavery. Ergo, the concept of working was liberating for white women but it was merely a source of discrimination and exploitation for black women. Susan Brownmiller‘s book on the history of rape, Against Our Will: Men and Women and Rape, published in 1975 further strained the tenuous bonds between white feminist and black women. The book studied in a racial light the 1955 Emmet Till murder in Mississippi, and justified the murder. She said that white women had always been of interest to black men like ‗forbidden fruit‘. This attitude made black women resentful and both hurt their sentiments and degraded them. The SNCC which was a compound of varied class, race, gender and ethnic values also widened the distance between white and black women. While there was an intermingling of races in an attempt to eradicate racism, the interest that black men showed in white women was interpreted by their own women as an indication of rejection. Thus the already existing divide between the two groups became more pronounced. We find that the genesis of Black Feminism was rooted not only in the identity politics of the latter part of the Second Wave Feminism, or the sexism of the men of their own race but also by its marginalization by white women in the Feminist Movement.
MARRIAGE IN TROUBLED WATERS: SHASHI DESHPANDE‟S ROOTS AND SHADOWS, THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR AND THAT LONG SILENCE
Ms. Shamenaz
Shashi Deshpande has a distinct place among Indian Women novelists in the contemporary scenario. The problem of adjustment with the husband and within the home has been the most consistent theme in the novels written by Deshpande. Her work reflects the conflict between tradition and modernity as manifested within the context of the family. She also deals with many major contemporary problems existing in society. But the basis of all the problems hinges on the relation of man and woman. In an interview with Geeta Gangadharan she stated: Human relationship is what a writer is involved with. Person to person and person to society relationships – these are the two primary concerns of a creative writer, to me; the former is of immense importance. My pre-occupation is with impersonal relationships and human emotions. (11) Thus, the different relationships existing in a woman's life vis-à-vis men and how she deals with them are the central themes which she has discussed in her novels. Roots and Shadows, The Dark Holds No Terror and That Long Silence, are three novels of Deshpande which show the complexities of husband-wife relationship in the Indian society. Roots and Shadows is the maiden novel of Shashi Deshpande. It is the story of the triumph and tragedy of a house and a family. Not only this it is also the story of Indu, who on the death of Akka, has to suddenly and unexpectedly don the mantle of the family monarch. Her second novel, The Dark Holds No Terror, which is told mainly in the first person narrative, is the story of Sarita who attempts to free herself from the terrifying complexes of guilt which threaten to engulf her from her childhood. As in, Roots and Shadows, in this novel Sarita comes back to her parent's house after fifteen years when her mother dies. It is a story of the inner conflict of a woman caught between traditional and modern ways. Saru, the protagonist is caught between these two different cultural worlds while she searches for her identity. The novel is based on the problems faced by a career woman who is professionally better than the husband. Her novel, That Long Silence, is a story of a woman's intellectual self, grappling with her emotional self, involving a terrible painful honesty in the way she is able to see her own relationships with others. In this novel, Jaya the protagonist is a failed writer. She comes to live in her Dadar flat after seventeen years of marriage, when her husband Mohan‘s reputation is in question and he has been charged in a forgery case. There are no happy marriages in Shashi Deshpande‘s novels. All the three protagonists in these three novels, Indu in Roots and Shadows, Sarita is The Dark Holds No Terror, and Jaya in That Long Silence have no romantic notions about marriages and agree that "marriage itself is a difficult enough business", (98) but is necessary for every individual. This attitude is caused by the problems which they have faced in their conjugal lives. Indu and Sarita revolted against their families to marry of their own choice and Jaya thought Mohan to be very understanding and supportive. But marriage fails to provide them the love or the freedom that they had hoped for. It does not give them the emotional support, autonomy and self-realization which they need. In fact, marriage, in a traditional society, becomes only another enclosure that restricts the movement towards autonomy and self-realization. Indu, Sarita and Jaya are not happy in their married lives but they are trying to adjust and adapt themselves according to the wishes of their husbands. They strive to achieve happiness in their lives but realize that neither love nor happiness comes to them for the asking. Indu, a liberal and sensitive young woman has taken the bold step of marrying Jayant inspite of a strong condemnation from Akka in the hope that she will achieve happiness in her life with Jayant, whom she loves very much. But though eleven years have passed, her marital life is a disappointment. Jayant, who is educated and apparently a modern man, is a typical Indian husband in his demands and expectations. But although she does not have an ideal life with him, she is not unhappy either and does not want to leave him because she feels she can't live without him. She feels that without Jayant she is incomplete: This is my real sorrow. That, I can never be complete in myself. Until I had met Jayant I had known it... that there was, somewhere outside me, a part of me, without which, I remained incomplete. Then I met Jayant. And, lost the ability to be alone. (31) Indu‘s intimacy with Naren is based on the fact that he is able to understand her better than her husband Jayant. They come closer because of similarity of views. Indu is able to dispassionately analyze her relationship with her husband and even discuss it candidly with Naren. Yet, in the beginning when Naren tries to flirt with her, she warns him ―I'm essentially monogamous. For me, its one man and one man only.‘ (81) However, the same Indu's response is different after few days later. In The Dark Holds No Terror, the protagonist Saru is ambitious and wants to outshine others and achieve success. Her socializing with Boozie "the fairy godfather" is a calculated move in that direction. She develops an intimate relationship with him. Soon their relationship reaches a stage where Boozie helps her financially to set up her own practice in a posh area. This accounts for her rapid climb to position and status. Saru stifles her scruples by telling herself: ...I told myself my relationship with this man couldn't, wouldn't hurt Manu. It was first a teacher-student relationship. If he put his hand on my shoulder, or slapped me on my back, that was just mannerism and meant nothing. It had nothing to do with me and Manu. (153) Both Saru and Boozie have their vested interests in sustaining such a relationship.
Although there is nothing physical about their relationship, it gives rise to a misconception in Manu's mind. Similarly, in That Long Silence, Jaya develops an intimate relationship with Kamat, who is her neighbour. However, she is unable to find a name for it. She ponders: My relationships with this man...refused to take any shape at all; it just slipped about, frighteningly fluid. (151) Jaya's husband Mohan is not able to understand her and discourages the writer in her. Kamat, on the contrary, understands her and fills the emptiness which has engulfed her, so she is inclined towards him. Jaya's association with Kamat, a widower living in the flat above hers lends yet another dimension to her personality. He is just the opposite of Mohan and a very sensitive man. However, what draws Jaya towards him is his intelligence, the fact that she can exchange ideas with him. He offers constructive criticism to Jaya on her writings. What attracts her even more is the fact that he is warm, friendly, and companionable. While others including Mohan, look down on her, he treats her as an equal, and is considerate and attentive: With this man I had not been a woman. I had been just myself – Jaya. There had been an ease in our relationship I had never known in any other, she gratefully acknowledges. (153) With Kamat, she is even able to reveal herself without inhibitions– ―I told him things I'd never been able to speak of, not to Dad, not to Mohan.‖ (153) According to her, he was free of the usual male complexes that put men on guard in their relationship with women. The nature of their relationship in the beginning can be termed as platonic but later on it develops physical overtones. At one moment he chides her like a father and then, at another moment he compliments her like a lover. In the privacy of his apartment she has ample opportunity for physical intimacy but she overcomes her yearnings in the interests of safeguarding her marriage. She is aware that in becoming Kamat's Jaya, she had temporarily totally forgotten Mohan. Years of traditional upbringing do not cause her to feel guilty and she is able to climb the stairs next day to visit Kamat once again. He had awakened her capacity for self-analysis and this often troubles her. These protagonists, Indu, Sarita and Jaya, are able to come closer to other men besides their husbands because of their unsatisfactory relations with them. The other men are able to understand them better than their own husbands and provide emotional support. Instead of a sense of guilt, these women exhibit a cool detachment. Simultaneously, this analytical capacity helps them to view their experiences in a proper perspective. Indu, Sarita and Jaya scoff at the romanticized concept of love: It is a big fraud, a hoax, that's what it is...The sexual instinct...that's true. The material instinct...that's true too. Self interest, self love...they are the basic truths. (158) Hence, the three protagonists are able to rationalize their friendships with these men. Indu as an educated, upper middle – class woman resents traditional practices which women of her family are following but like the protagonists of Deshpande's other novels, Jaya and Saru, she is caught in the intersection of age-old customs and modernity. There are many instances in the novel which show that she is playing the part of a wife truly well to keep her husband Jayant happy and satisfied. And she also continues to write for the magazine to satisfy herself. But once she is disillusioned by an incident of a woman's hypocrisy and subsequently the editor's attitude and she tells Jayant about it. Her husband‘s reaction is both disappointing and pragmatic. He says: That's life! What can one person do against the whole system! No point making yourself ridiculous with futile gestures. We need the money, don't we? Don't forget we have a long way to go. (17) So because of their financial needs, she continues writing, ignoring her conscience although she hates every moment of it. What she does write against her wishes is accepted by the editor and liked by the public. Although she takes Jayant‘s advice she hates her husband's materialistic and professional attitude towards life. Although Indu has adjusted to the hypocrisy of her husband, she has not accepted it from her heart. Earlier defying tradition she opts for a career and marries Jayant, who belong to a lower caste. She hopes that she will get a new liberal and independent environment but very soon her dream is shattered. She discovers that Jayant is like any other traditional husband. Describing her feelings she says: Jayant and I... I wish I could say we have achieved complete happiness. But I cannot fantasize. I think of the cries that had filled me earlier...I want to be loved. I want to be happy. The cries are now stilled. (13) Indu realizes that her marriage with Jayant has not turned out to be what she expected. Her husband takes her for granted and wants her to accept his decision in everything. However, Indu loves him so much that she is ready to do anything he wants. In this way she loses her individuality and independence. Although she is economically independent, she finds that she is not very different from the women whom she had earlier made fun of and mocked- like her Kakis and Atya in her ancestral home. She misses Jayant whenever he is away and wants him to be beside her, feeling quite helpless without him. She tells Naren: When I look in the mirror, I think of Jayant, when I dress, I think of Jayant. When I undress, I think of him. Always what he wants…. And I can‘t blame him. It‘s not he who has pressurized me into this. It‘s the way I want to be. (49) Thus, although she always tries to please Jayant, Indu also always questions herself wondering why pleasing him is so important to her– ―Have I become fluid, with no shape, no form of my own.‖ (49) In a sense, Akka‘s summons come at a time when Indu needs distance from her husband and home because she needs to think about and review her life to discover. She decides to go back to her ancestral house to seek refuge and clarity. In The Dark Holds No Terror, Sarita, the protagonist is facing sexual brutality by her husband because she is professionally better than him. Her husband, Manohar is consumed by an inferiority complex, which manifests itself in the form of sexual sadism. As S.Anandalakshmi opines: The supremacy of the male is so well established that the average Indian is surprised to even be queried about it. Whatever the ecology of the social group, even in communities where the women may be the breadwinners, the male is considered superior. Within the family the sense of inferiority of the female is pervasive. The sex ratio is unfavourable for girls and forces us to conclude that the survival of the girl is a matter of indifference in a considerable number of families. The birth of a son gives a woman status and she invests herself in her son's fixture, creating a deep symbiotic bond. (31) Saru is no stranger to this discrimination against girls. She has experienced it from her childhood by her mother because of her brother. When her brother Dhruva died because of drowning, she was accused by her mother for the tragedy. The tension between mother and daughter had resulted in feelings of deep resentment for each other. She had wanted to go away from her house and to achieve this, had sought admission in a Medical College. Thus Saru goes to College with the dream of economic independence as insurance for a better future. In the College she meets Manohar and falls in love with him. Manohar, better known as, Manu, is a few years senior to her and quite popular in the College. Saru is introduced to him by her friend. At their first meeting she remains totally unacknowledged by the handsome Manu. But after many meetings they become friends and a few years later, get married. She decides to marry Manu although she had to face a strong condemnation from her mother since he does not belong, like her, to a Brahmin family. And as she had defied her mother earlier so this time also Saru defies her mother and decides to marry Manu. By doing so, she thinks she will achieve happiness in her life but she is mistaken. She comes closer to Manu because she gets love and security from him which she has not received at her parental home because of her mother's harsh attitude. In the beginning of her marriage with Manu, she enjoys his company because she is merely a student and he the breadwinner of the family. At that time there is love and happiness in her life but all this happiness is short-lived. As long as she is just a medical student and her husband, the breadwinner of the family, there is peace and harmony at home but the problems begin when she starts establishing herself as a doctor and gaining recognition. Gradually people in the neighbourhood begin to visit her with requests of medical help and other related matters. With this growing recognition, her husband starts to feel inferior. Saru on the other hand felt exhilarated with her raising status and dignity. With this success in her profession, her marriage begins to crumble. So far, ―he had been the young man and I his bride. Now I was the lady doctor and he was my husband.‖ (50) Thus the role of husband-wife undergoes a reversal. In contrast to earlier times, she is now economically stronger than him, earning more money. This is not acceptable by Manu. His personality as a husband changes from an ideal romantic hero to a morose uncomfortable resentful husband. As Saru gains power Manu looses it. He feels embarrassed and humiliated when people ignore him and pay attention to his wife instead. Interestingly now Saru‘s own attitude towards Manu also changes. Earlier, she was happy and satisfied with his salary but now as a career woman, she wants to improve their living standard. Because of the brutal behaviour of her husband she begins to see sex as dirty and the experience, terrifying and insulting. As she recoils from Manu's love making he takes her rejection of sex as a rejection of himself. His already damaged ego becomes more aggravated, and this in turn manifests itself in the bedroom at night when he sexually brutalizes his wife. Gradually as Saru's social and financial status grows, in contrast, Manu continues as an underpaid lecturer in college. In reverse proportion with her gain in power and importance, her happiness at home becomes less and less. In our society, a man is expected to have a higher income than his wife. And this is experienced by Saru. Although Saru has achieved economic independence, her plight is miserable. Overwhelmed by the duties of housewife and doctor, of indoors and outdoors, she expresses her desire to leave her medical practice but Manu does not like it. But though Manu's problem is located in Saru‘s professional success, the luxuries that her income provides are too good to lose. At this juncture in her life, Saru hears the news of her mother's death. Unable to bear, the situation at home any longer, she goes back to her parent's home–a place she had vowed never to go. The home coming helps her to sort out her problems, to analyze her life, to review and re-examine her crisis which she even discusses with her father. In this novel, Shashi Deshpande has described the predicament of both woman as well as man in society. If a woman is economically independent she has to suffer but a man who is economically inferior to his wife also suffers. The novel, That Long Silence, is the portrayal of the damage caused by non- communication and silence in the modern Indian housewife‘s marriage. Jaya the protagonist of the novel is a very well read person, possessing a literary sensibility. The novel opens with Jaya accompanying her husband to their old Dadar flat in Bombay to keep a low profile till the trouble in his office settles down. Their children Rahul and Rati are away on a long tour with their family friends. So Jaya follows her husband into exile as Indian women are expected to do. Alone in the small flat, away from their usual busy schedule, Jaya reviews her married life with objectivity. Although she is married to Mohan and has two children, she feels lonely. Her husband is not able to understand her feelings and as a result she is torn from within. She describes her married life as: A pair of bullocks yoked together... a clever phrase, but can it substitute for the reality? A man and a woman married for seventeen years. A couple with two children. A family somewhat like the one caught and preserved for posterity by the advertising visuals I so loved. But the reality was only this. We were two persons. A man. A woman. (8) She thinks in this way because they both have done their duties as husband-wife. In fact, she has even suppressed her writing career because of her husband. But they have not been able to understand each other. In the early years of her marriage Jaya had tried to establish herself as a creative writer. She had written a story about, "a couple, a man who cannot reach out to her wife except through her body." (144) It had been an honest probing into life and had appeared in a magazine and even won a prize for its authentic depiction of life. But her husband, who had encouraged earlier, was very hurt by the story. He believed that the story was a literal presentation of their own married life. Though she knew that there was no truth in what her husband thought, she did not try to reason with him, and kept quiet. Looking at his stricken face, I had been convinced. I had done him wrong. And I had stopped writing after that. (144) Although she had stopped writing because of her husband, the decision continues to trouble her. She is deeply distressed to know that the writer in her cannot come to light because of her husband.Though Mohan was modern in many ways, yet his ego was easily damaged. Jaya resolves the problem by writing under a pseudonym, but that does not help, and her stories are rejected one after another. Her neighbour Kamat, who is a very good friend, suggests that she should write stories with strong emotions expressing anger and frustration, but Jaya does not want to do anything that will jeopardize her relationship with her husband. Kamat, however, is not satisfied with her logic and advices her to be honest in the expression of her emotions. Disregarding his advice she begins to write light humorous pieces on the travails of a middle-class housewife entitled "Seeta". This receives a good response not only from the editors and readers but also from her husband. Jaya like a traditional wife, obedient to her husband in all ways, makes all compromises to satisfy him and make him happy. But in this appeasement her inner self remains unsatisfied. In becoming simply Mohan's wife and Rahul and Rati's mother, her own selfhood is in danger of being lost. She pities herself for being so but she can't help it. She even loses her own sense of identity and models herself according to the wishes of Mohan. To please him she changes her appearance and her manner of dressing. She can't even think of living without him. She is always conscious and waiting for Mohan to come home. She is constantly living in fear that something might happen to him and she will be left alone. Though Jaya has changed herself according to modern standards, her modernity is just a pose; for at heart she continues to be a traditional woman not at all free from the age-old traditional codes of conduct. Her Vanita Mami had advised her before her marriage: Remember Jaya, a husband is like a sheltering tree. Keep the tree alive and flourishing, even if you have to water it with deceit and lies. And if your husband has a mistress or two, ignore it. Take up a hobby instead, cats, may be, or your sister's children. (32) Though Jaya was not convinced by Vanita Mami's advice she finds herself walking the same path in her marriage.
On his part, Mohan has been a good provider but he is not able to give her the kind of love, she craves. And she is not able to tell Mohan what she needs because she had learnt what works in a marriage is- ―No questions, no retorts. Only silence."(143) Mohan is never really concerned about her feelings and emotions. He is happy as long as she fulfils the roles of mother and wife as per social expectations. She analyses her relationship with Mohan: First there is love, and then there is sex– that was how I had always imagined it to be. But after living with Mohan I had realized that it could so easily be the other way around. (95) Although they have been married for seventeen years and there have been no clashes between them, but also has been no understanding, no deep feelings and no passion. Their opinions are completely different from each other. She thinks, ―We are together but there had been only emptiness between us.‖ (185) this emptiness fills her entire being and is the reason why Jaya is inclined towards Kamat who gives her emotional support. Mohan is a good husband and has always tried to provide his wife and his children with material of comforts and all types of luxuries, for which he has used both right and wrong means. Jaya has never questioned or argued with him about these practices; rather she has kept quiet accepting everything. She never complains to Mohan about what she wants. They are actually leading a good family life at least outwardly. But the problem arises with the crisis in his office and the charge of malpractices. Jaya is ashamed of the incident. Mohan gets angry accusing her and defends himself by saying.‖ It was for you and the children that I did this. I wanted you to have a good life. I wanted the children to have all those things which I never had‖. (9)Thus the crisis of Mohan's professional life brings a crisis to his family life too. Each reacts to the crisis in a different manner. Mohan expects Jaya to share his anxiety, to provide him with emotional support. But Jaya, who is shocked after getting to know what Mohan has been up to, is unable to reassure him. He charges her of being cold and indifferent towards him. He accuses her for his troubles and is unsatisfied with his wife's attitude. He walks out of the house leaving her feeling deserted and lonely. At this time of despair, she gets the news of the disappearance of her son Rahul, who was holidaying with their family friends. She feels totally shattered and lost as there is nobody to console and help her. The days which she spends alone without Mohan in the flat give her a sense of perspective- she is able to review her life dispassionately and see where she has made mistakes. And when she receives a telegram from Mohan that "All is well" and Rahul has also come back, she can see things in a clearer light and with relief. Her innermost thoughts come out through this experience. And all the fears and doubts which she had experienced disappear. She decides that she will not suppress her feelings and try to communicate with her husband. Rather than give in to all his wishes she finally wants to break the silence which she has kept throughout her life. Shashi Deshpande in, Roots and Shadows, The Dark Holds No Terror and That
Long Silence, had tried to show the conflict existing in the husband-wife relationship in the Indian society and the reasons behind it. References 1. Gangadharan, Geeta. Interview with Shashi Deshpande, "Denying the Otherness," Indian Communicator, Sunday Magazine, 20 Nov, 1994.
2. Shashi Deshpande, Roots and Shadows. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1980.
3. --- The Dark Holds No Terror. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
4. --- That Long Silence (New Delhi, Penguin Books, 1993)
5. Anandalakshmi. S. The Female Child in Family Setting, The Indian Journal of Social Work LII, 1 ( Jan 1991 )
------
THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH IN INDIA : SOCIETY AND CHANGE
Suruchi Dubey
Introduction: English is taught in India very extensively as a compulsory second language or a second language in all schools and most colleges. The status of the language and the emphasis on its teaching learning varies from region to region. In some areas it is accorded the status of an official language and it teaching begins in the first year of school. In some others it is accorded the status of a second language. In spite of the variations in the status accorded to English the fact remains that all students completing their school education have had at least five years of English learning. Considering the fact that India has such a vast infrastructure for teaching English to so many learners and the fact that quite a large number of institutions like Central Institute of English, Regional Institute of English and the National Council of Educational Research and Training are constantly engaged in the process of experimenting with methods or materials of teaching English, it is natural to expect that proficiency level of English amongst educated Indians would be high. It is a fact that India had been exposed to English for two hundred years during the British Raj and it is the medium of instruction in most of the administrative offices of the Central Government and the highest echelons of Judiciary. However, inspite of this the proficiency level in English is poor. A majority of the learners lack communicative skills in English.
The Spread of English: No one knows for certain how English spread in India. It is generally assumed that the first contact with the English came through the travellers and traders in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. It spread more rapidly as the British established themselves as the paramount power during the eighteenth and nineteenth century (Majumdar 1971:403). However, the spread of English in India is quite different from that of America. Firstly, the number of native-English-speaking- migrants was quite small. Secondly, when the English came to India they found a well developed and established multilingual and multicultural community. Besides, as Schuchardt observes the English who came to India made no attempt to learn the local vernaculars. Rather, to communicate with the local people they used local Indians who had picked up enough English to act as interpreters, between the British and Indian traders. It is through these native interpreters that the bulk of the untranslated native expressions, which gave a distinct character to the speech of Englishmen who came to India, were introduced into the English language (Gilbert (Ed.) 1980:53). History suggests that at the early stage there was no formal or systematic attempt to teach English to Indians. In fact in the multilingual and multicultural Indian subcontinent at this time there was no tradition for teaching second language at all.
Though some attempts were made by Englishmen to break the language barrier, it was much easier for Indians to pick up English through informal contacts as different languages were spoken in different regions (Datta 1991:63).
The Process of Indianization of English: The informal contact way of the spread of English naturally gave way to the development of several varieties of English in course of time, in different parts of the country. Among these are Boxwallah English of Upper India, Butler English of Bombay and Babu English of Bengal. These varieties have all the qualities of a pidgin like limited vocabulary and elimination of many grammatical devices of number and gender (Mehrotra 1982; Widdowson 1979). The features common to all varieties of English which developed in India however, is markedly reflected in the vocabulary and pronunciation. Since English came to play a functional role in the Indian context it had to expand and adopt from the existing linguistic environment. Peculiarities of pronunciations like inability to distinguish between /b/and /v/ in Bengal, between /e/ and /ae/in Gujarat or rounding of vowels in Orissa are but a few examples of this. Vocabulary items like ryot, jodhpurs, hartal and maidan came to be incorporated within the language. One can say that a process of hybridization came in English, where new words and expressions by combining units of two different languages began to be used. In fact the language contact situation of this time only encouraged this and expression like Lathi- charge and Sepoy detachments came to be used more and more. Along with the process of hybridization, there has also come about a peculiar situation of code-mixing and code-switching even in the Indian languages, Studies conducted by Datta (1984), Gumprez (1982), Kumar (1982) Kachru (1978) have shown that not only do Indians mix words from their own language while speaking English, but they do often use English words while speaking in their own tongues. This probably has come about from the contact of English and the mother-tongue in a very intense way. English and the vernacular languages have come to signify two parts of the existence of most educated Indians. So whereas, English has adopted words from the Indian languages similarly the Indian languages have also adopted words from English.
Status of English during the British Raj: Once the British became the administrators of India, the status of English underwent a sea change. From being a foreign language used by a handful of traders for the purpose of trade it became the language of the rulers. Though still considered as a foreign language it became the language of administration. Indians were quick to see the advantages of learning English and they started learning it. Even patriotic Indians started realizing the advantages the knowledge of English offered and advocated its learning. The fact remains that in the three Presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, English came to be learnt with lot of enthusiasm as a window to the world of knowledge science, technology and philosophy. It was this generation of Educated Indians of the nineteenth century who brought about the Indian Renaissance.
Early Methods of Teaching English: The British Government's Education Policy did not suggest any methodology for teaching English in India. The attempts of the Missionaries in teaching English were haphazard and nothing much is known about the methods adopted by them. However, in most of the vernacular medium of schools the Grammar-Translation Method was adopted (Gangly 1986:62). This was favoured by the Indian teachers because most of them had poor abilities in the spoken form of the language and this approach saved them from speaking English in their classes, they preferred to make their learners learn by rote the grammatical patterns of English. It was also preferred as it did not demand any teaching aids and large groups could be handled by a single teacher. This approach made the learners strong in grammar but neglected to develop the communicational skills in English (Mackey 1965). The early parts of twentieth century saw the influence of Palmer, Sweet and Jesperson on English teaching in India. The result was the development of what we call Direct Method. In India its adoption saw the emphasis on suppression of mother tongue (Ghosh). Most probably the British teachers in Indian schools found this approach to be most suitable because it made it possible for them to teach in India without the necessity of having to learn the Indian languages. This method appeared to work in the English medium schools where, what was being learnt in the English class was not the only source for gaining proficiency in English. English also got learnt incidentally in the other classes as well. Thus learners in the English medium schools became proficient communications in the language as a result of their exposure to English during their entire school day. In vernacular medium schools however, this approach proved to be a disastrous one. The over emphasis on unilingual presentation and the incidental presentation of grammar confused both the teachers and learners alike. With the result, no language learning seemed to take place. In fact it proved to be disastrous in most Indian schools. This also saw the beginning of the growth of two categories of learners one proficient in English as a result of attending English medium schools and another poor communication in English as a result of not being exposed to the communicative use of the language.
The Role and Status of English in Independent India: The consequences of about two hundred years of British rule in India is that English has been firmly transplanted into Indian soil. During British Raj its status had been raised to that of an Official Language.lt had also become the medium of instruction in a great number of schools and colleges, and still remains the predominant medium of instruction for Higher Education. Amongst the educated Indians, it has become the means of communication across language barriers. In fact, as has been pointed out, the English language attained status in India that had been attained by no other language before. During the Muslim rule Persian had acquired the status of the official language but had failed to attain the status of a Common language. For the first time in Indian history English, under the British rule, provided the medium of communication across the vast subcontinent (Das Gupta 1970:40)
After the independence the controversy rose as to what is to be done with this legacy of the British Raj. The Constituent Assembly, that came into existence in December 1946, after much controversy decided that the official language of the Union should be Hindi in Deva Nagri Script. For a period of fifteen years from the effective date of the adoption of the Constitution, English would in addition to Hindi. This compromise has instead of helping solve the language issue has further complicated the matter. As Das Gupta (1970) points out the framers of the Constitution while choosing a single official language, did not define the role and status of an official language in a multilingual and multiethnic situation as in India. The result has been that we have been debating in the intellectual circles about the language policy and have coined terms like 'national language', 'official language' and 'common language' but have made no distinctions between them. As a result most of us overlook the fact that there are restrictions in the use of English in India. Raja Rao (1971) sums this dilemna up in the following words, "It is the language of our intellectual life-like Sanskrit and Persian before-but not of our emotional make-up". This observation sums up the dilemna regarding the status of English in India. In spite of having served as an official language and common language English has not and cannot ever attain the status of national language in India. Das Gupta (1970: 44) puts it more explicitly: “Even among Indians who had accepted English education, the use of English was and still is -confined to certain behavioural situations... The center of the individual‟s life comprising home, family, and kindred, rarely saw the English code for communication. English therefore, was reserved for official, academic and other relatively cosmopolitan behavioural situations”. In this context we would perhaps be more realistic in our approach if we try to define the status of official English from a Psycho-linguistic, socio-linguistic and, pedagogic point of view. From this we could say that: the status of English is somewhere in between a Second language and a foreign language. Something more than a foreign language because of varied communicative functions performed by English and due to the fact that it is a language which has been Indianized to a considerable extent over the years of its existence in India. Less than a second language because it is the mother tongue of an insignificant minority of the population and it is also not the language for the expression of our emotions. The functional role of English as the 'Language of intellect' and as an 'intra- national ' and 'inter- national' link language is very much appreciated, particularly by the educated middle class. It seems unlikely that any other vernacular language is going to replace English to perform this role. This is easily noticeable by the eagerness of the people to educate their words in English medium schools and by the concern expressed by the people at the falling standards of English.
The Social Aspects of English Teaching-Learning: The social dilemna of Indian Society, particularly the educated middle class is obvious from the preceding discussion. On one hand pressures from many State Governments has seen the lowering of the status and emphasis on the teaching of English. The nationalistic leaders have often condemned the continuation of English for such a long time and have often advocated its total abolition. This is true in most states of northern India. For the students coming from vernacular medium schools and from semi-urban and rural areas, where the teaching of English is often haphazard, find the slogans attractive as English for them is a difficult language to gain proficiency in. However, most of these students face problems when they attempt to study in the institutions of higher education particularly specialized and technical education where the medium of instruction is invariably English. It is thus observed that proficiency in English has become a sort of parameter to decide who will go in for higher education and who will not. Surveys conducted amongst learners of English in different parts of the country show that almost all learners have a strong motivation for learning English, but the system of language teaching makes it difficult for them to do so and repeated failures totally de-motivate them. With the result even in rural and semi-urban areas, the moneyed send their children to the so called English medium schools in the hope that competence in English would give them the better opportunities of life.
Pedagogic Aspect of the Problem: Since the fifties structural approach has been adopted in India for teaching English officially. This approach bases itself on the premise that once this structures are introduced in a graded manner and these are drilled through constant pattern -practice drill the learners would be able to use the language in communicative situation. With this intention specialized materials were created keeping in mind the structures known by the learners and the structure being introduced in that particular lesson. However, the approach did not produce the desired results because in the classroom nothing changed and it continued to be ' teacher-textbook-taught' situation. The teacher teaches the lesson, paraphrased it, sometimes in the mother tongue and explained the grammatical items and sometimes dictated notes. The learner became a passive participant in the process of acquiring language skills. Wherever he got an environment to be exposed to the use of English he picked it up as in English medium schools. Quite naturally learners from vernacular medium schools could not use English. Some attempts have been made to attempt remedial measures. Widdowson (1968) has recommended introduction of communicative language teaching for ESP courses in science and technology and social sciences. Prabhu (1979) made an attempt to use communicative language teaching through problem solving tasks it involves an indigenous methodology. Loyola College made an attempt to use the behaviouristic principles of Skinner to teach language (Xavier et. al. 1989) however most of these are still at the level of experimentation and are yet to make their impact felt in big way.
Conclusion: It is an accepted fact that English would continue to play an important functional role as the language of intra and inter regional communication particularly in the field of higher education and intellectual exchange. However, unless serious attempts are made to ensure that all learners leaving school have sufficient proficiency in English to pursue higher education, knowledge of English would become the key to success in life.
References: 1. Chatterjee,K.K. 1976. English Education in India: Issues and Opinions. Macmillian; New Delhi. 2. Das Gupta, J.1970. Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and Language Policy in India. University of California 3. Datta, C. 1991. ―An Impact of Historical and Social Changes on Methods of Teaching English as a Second Language in the Indian Subcontinent‖ in society and change. 4. Palmer, H.E.1917. The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages. Harrap, London. 5. Sweet, Henry.1964. The Practical Study of Languages. OUP, London. 6. Widdowson, H.G.1968. ―The Teaching of English Through Science‖. J. Dakin et al., OUP, London 7. Widdowson, H.G. 1979. Explorations in Applied Linguistic. OUP, London.
------
FROM DIVIDED SELVES TO AN INTEGRATED SELF: JOAN IN ATWOOD‟S LADY ORACLE
Vijeta Gautam & Dr. Jyotsna Sinha
The relationships we have with different people throughout our lives are strong influences on us all. Our relationships with one another can define who we are, as well as the quality of the lives we lead. Strenuous relationships cause stress and unhappiness, while close, loving relationships are a source of support and comfort. Joan Foster, the main character in Margaret Atwood‘s Lady Oracle, is a complex woman who has had more than her share of turbulent relationships during her life. From her childhood and teenage relationship with her mother, to her bond with her husband later in life, Joan‘s relationships are rarely free of turmoil and drama. These relationships definitely have an influence on Joan, impacting her as a person. The first major relationship in Joan‘s life is the one with her mother. Joan feels unwanted and unloved by her mother, who treats Joan coldly because of her weight problem. At first, Joan struggles to fit in with her mother‘s perfect vision of her and tries to live up to her mother‘s expectations. When she fails at this, Joan resents her mother‘s unbearable attitude and becomes antagonistic towards her. Joan‘s identity then becomes based on the opposite of what her mother expects and wants from her. ―At this time my mother gave me a clothing allowance, as an incentive to reduce. She thought I should buy clothes that would make me less conspicuous, the dark dresses with tiny polka-dots and vertical stripes favoured by designers for the fat. Instead I sought out clothes of a peculiar and offensive hideousness, violently coloured, horizontally striped. Some of them I got in maternity shops, others at cut- rate discount stores; I was especially pleased with a red felt skirt, cut in a circle with a black telephone appliquéd onto it. The brighter the colors, the more rotund the effect, the more certain I was to buy. I wasn‘t going to let myself be diminished, neutralizes, by a navy-blue polka-dot sack.‖1 By doing all this she only wanted to annoy her mother. Her goal was to be her mother‘s opposite. The mother in Lady Oracle strives to be a fully capable housewife by giving dinner parties to her husband's colleagues and maintaining a spotless house. To her, the biggest failure of her identity as a successful housewife is having a rebellious daughter, whose obesity is a contradiction to the stereotypical image of feminine beauty, and thus a manifestation of the mother's failure to keep everything decent and within the confines of her control. Joan has no feelings for her father as she rarely spoke to him. She forms a silent identity with him. Her father also had no expectations for her. When Joan meets Paul in London, she reacts in a way that he will find acceptable and not to get irritated. This is a direct contradiction of the identity Joan assumed when dealing with her mother. Instead of going against Paul‘s wishes, Joan becomes passive. Her passiveness is easily visible during the beginning of her stay in Paul‘s home as his mistress. Instead of voicing concern of any kind, Joan simply lets Paul do as he will. That becomes the pattern with Joan as her relationship with Paul progresses. Her identity at this point is based on Paul. She is nothing more than an extension of Paul. Problems begin when Joan tries to break out of this pattern. Paul‘s tolerance and patience regarding Joan began to whither as she started to do more things for herself, instead of doing things that pleased him. ―Paul began to have fits of jealousy. It was all right as long as I did nothing but loll around the flat, reading and typing out my Costume Gothics and going nowhere except with him.‖2 Joan‘s identity had gone from being based on Paul‘s wishes to being based on wishes of her own, and the turmoil in her relationship with Paul grew until she left and moved in with Arthur. However, Joan‘s relationship with Arthur is much like her relationship with Paul. Once married and settled down, Joan returns to her pattern of doing what she thinks Arthur wants and shaping herself in a way that will be more appealing to him. She lies to Arthur about her past, never telling him of her strained relationship with her mother or her battles with her weight, all in an effort to become the type of wife that she thinks Arthur wants. Joan feels that her real identity isn‘t good enough, so she creates one. Her primary goal is being an ideal wife for Arthur and making sure that he is not displeased with her. ―Though I was tempted sometimes, I resisted the impulse to confess. Arthur‘s tastes were Spartan, and my early life and innermost self would have appalled him. It would be like asking for a steak and getting a slaughtered cow.‖3 The poems contained in Joan‘s book give insight into how Joan really feels about her marriage to Arthur, even though she denies that the book is about him. Just as with Paul, Joan‘s first act of doing something for herself creates static in her relationship with Arthur. Joan goes even further and has an affair, further asserting her own needs and identity, instead of Arthur‘s. It is no surprise that she fakes her death and runs away from her life with Arthur soon thereafter. Joan, the daughter in Lady Oracle, rebels against her mother but then sways between the two positions of a housewife and an artist. Despite her rebellion against her mother, who acts as cultural agent to transmit stereotypes and the conventional roles of women to her daughter and who transmits social mythology – fictional constructs into which Joan is expected to fit, Joan gets assimilated in the patriarchal culture through her mother's influences as well as social and cultural activities as taking school education, reading and writing Costume Gothic romances and watching Hollywood movies. Nevertheless, as an artist with abundant imaginative power, Joan is able to first survive social prejudices and then improve herself through fantasizing and creative writing, both of which help her work out psychologically and think through her relationships with her mother and eventually reject the stereotypes on women imposed on her as well as her mother. In other words, it takes a large part of her life and a lot more struggles on Joan's part to accomplish- a spiritual quest for artistic independence. This paper examines not only the mother-daughter relationship in Joan's domestic household, but also her interpersonal relationships in her social arena and her creative process. The word ‗mother‘ here means both Joan's biological mother, Frances, and her surrogate mother, Aunt Lou. The biological is engaged in a battle over Joan's body in which Joan's fantasies about the maternal body are played out, whereas the surrogate mother inspires Joan to identify with the stereotypical portrait of female artists in Hollywood films. Both mothers, nonetheless, cause her existence as multiple and divided selves, and her escapes into fantasies. However, through her development of multiple selves and her formation of psychic fantasies and creative fantasies by turns, Joan as an artist learns to integrate her divided selves into a coherent one, to release the mothers- she is obsessed with, and to reject stereotypes and conventions imposed on women. This takes on significance when Joan decides to take her Aunt Lou‘s full name, Louisa K. Delacourt, as her pen name. Aunt Lou was the only person that Joan showed her true identity to, without putting on a performance. In the same way, Louisa K. Delacourt served as Joan‘s only outlet where she could be herself after Aunt Lou‘s death. Throughout Atwood‘s novel, Joan‘s identity is determined by the relationships she has with the different people she encounters throughout her life. Joan spends a great deal of her life pretending to be a person that she is not. In her third novel Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood gives us a very self-determined and active mother and a daughter whose life and writings are haunted by the mother. Moreover, it is through rewriting Costume Gothic conventions and telling her life story that Joan gains new awareness about her mother and her own identity. Joan, however, is "motherless' only in the second half of the novel, which makes Lady Oracle significantly different from the nineteenth-century women's realist novels. In other words, like many contemporary feminist writers, Atwood locates mothers' and daughters' problems in a variety of socially and historically specific situations. The mothers' voices in women's post-war literature become more audible and diverse, and this is especially the case after the 1960s and under the influence of the Second-Wave Feminism. Although the second-wave feminism started with a refusal of motherhood, as well as the familial constraints imposed on women by mothers, it discloses all kinds of inequality women suffer in domestic and public spheres. The unhappy and raging mother in Lady Oracle is keen in transforming her appearance and the appearance of her house into the ones advocated in magazines, and her unhappiness, often recalled by Joan, bespeaks the war bride's maladjustment after losing her war-time power and having to succumb to domesticity. If it is difficult for a woman to be a mother in the midst of gender inequality and socio-economic exploitation, it is even more difficult for a woman to be an artist and writer. As women's voices get diversified after the 1960s, one of the most active voices is that of female writers. In the female writers' treatments of mother-daughter relationships, moreover, diversification means a gradual shift of focus in writings from the daughters' perspectives to those of the mother's or of both. In such a context, Lady Oracle is transitional because, instead of allowing the women of the other racial backgrounds, it focuses on the daughter, Joan Foster, who emerges at the end of the novel as a true artist and begins to understand the mother through creative writing. Writing, as it is for the female writers before her, is difficult for Joan, not, however, in the sense of getting published or becoming famous, but in the sense of finding her own voice and rejecting patriarchal ideologies and the stereotypes of femininity her mothers try to install in her. The difficulties Joan, the artist has in rejecting her mothers and the social stereotypes of femininity, then, make Lady Oracle an interesting contrast to the preceding women's texts in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, in which the mothers are either rejected, missed, or celebrated. Not only is Joan preoccupied with the mothers and fantastic projections on them, she seems to take on various social stereotypes imposed on her easily and happily. In Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood states that Joan‘s interaction with her mother in childhood, or the lack of it, has profound impact which can last into her adulthood. If Joan rejects the mother's attempt to trim her by binge eating, interestingly, through eating as well as through her infantile gaze, Joan identifies with the mother, both her good and bad sides. She fantasizes and plays different stereotypical roles in both her life and her work, and these playful but creative activities in the potential space serve for her to try out some stereotypical relationships so as to finally grow beyond the stereotypes as well as the plots of patriarchal romance. This paper focuses on Joan's development through self-splitting, enactment of multiple roles, to finally performing a ritual of death and re-birth denoting first the daughter's prolonged symbiotic relations with the mothers, escapes into fantasies, and then her gradual realization of the mothers' limitations and the stereotypes imposed on her. To think through the mothers, however, does not mean to reject and move beyond the mothers as persons, rather, it means for Joan a genuine understanding of the mothers' and the daughters' problems. Moreover, it is through creative activities that such genuine understanding is achieved and Joan herself is empowered to reject some of the stereotypes. Indeed, Joan at the end may not be able to be free from all the gender stereotypes, but at least in her last novel she successfully rejects some of them. Joan desires to expel the threatening bad mother from her psyche and to disentangle herself from the symbiotic bonding. In her unconsciousness, she experiences fits of anxieties because of the projection of a fantasy bad breast onto the biological mother that threatens to reduce her body, and in contrast, the sense of nourishment and security is attained by projecting the good breast onto binge eating and her surrogate mother, Aunt Lou. Besides splitting herself into the bad and good breasts and projecting her mother as the bad one, Joan experiences another kind of self-splitting in the process of her socialization. On the one hand, to survive in the social arena, she consciously divides herself into a kind auntie figure in school and a monster underneath. On the other hand, Joan‘s surrogate mother, Aunt Lou, provides her with illusive escapes into fantasies, that is, romantic ideologies and the stereotype of female artists in Hollywood movies. Besides her ideological legacy, Aunt Lou literally provides Joan with a means to reject her mother: using the ‗physical trimming' as a term of getting the aunt's inheritance. The biological mother-daughter symbiotic relationship is thus severed apparently, with the daughter Joan's running away to a self-constructed world of patriarchal fantasies and maternal shadows. In her adulthood, however, Joan falsely believes she can segregate fantasy from reality, for instance, she wants to draw a definite line between her affair with the Royal Porcupine and her marriage to Arthur, and such false belief induces her to be schizophrenic. Yet, Joan's construction of fantasies has positive values. Through participating in transitional phenomena– role-playing, constructing fantasies, and writing– and realizing the impossibility of living in fantasies, Joan learns to integrate her multiple, yet divided selves and act meaningfully on them. The divided selves result from both her self-splitting to reject the mother and her attempts to socialize and attract the men around her. Joan does not passively repeat stereotypes of female artists and fantasies in Costume Gothics and popular culture. She actively constructs her own fantasy, that of the Fat Lady, and becomes more active in her engagement in the objective reality during her writing process.
References Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. London: Virago Press, 1982. 1- Ibid p.-84 2- – p.-158 3- – p.-215 Bartkey, Lee Sandra. "Faucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power" Feminism and Foucault Reflections on Resistance, ed. I. Diamond and L. Quinby. Boston: North-eastern University Press, 1990. 25- 45. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. Grace, E. Sherill. Violent Duality. A Study of Margaret Atwood. Montreal: Vehicle Press, 1978. Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Margaret Atwood. Conversations. London: Virago Press Limited, 1992. MacLean, Susan. "Lady Oracle: The Art of Reality and the Reality of Art." Journal of Canadian Fiction, Number 22, (1978). Russ, Joanna. "Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic." Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 6(4), (1973). 666-691. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing, Revised Edition. London: Virago, 1982. ------
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES AND OTHER DETAILS The International Journal of Culture, Literature and Criticism, ISSN: 0976- 1608 is published bi-annually.Unpublished research papers discussing various issues relating to culture, literature &criticism and creative writing with an emphasis on the theme of Postmodernism and Translations into English are reviewed by our distinguished members of Editorial board and Editor. Only selected papers are processed further for publication. Our Editorial board consists of: Editor Dr Bashabi Fraser Dr. Jyotsna Lecturer in English and Creative Writing Sinha, School of Arts & Creative Industries Assistant Edinburgh Napier University Professor, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK Department of Humanities and Eucharia Donnery, Social Sciences, Lecturer, Center for the Teaching of Foreign MNNIT, Languages in General Education, Allahabad. Sophia University, Tokyo 102-8554 The Articles not exceeding 4000 words on A4 size paper and adhering to MLA style formatting (7th Edition) leaving Normal margins on all four sides in DOUBLE SPACE and 12 point Times New Roman font with a certificate that the article /paper is original and unpublished are solicited for publication in The International Journal Of Culture, Literature and Criticism. The contributions may be sent through E-mail .The authors name, institution, phone/mobile number and E-mail address should be mentioned in the title sheet. The papers submitted should evince serious academic work contributing new knowledge or innovative critical perspective on the subject explored.
Deadline for submission: September 2011 Issue (Issue No.4) 30th July 2011 Annual Subscription Charges: India: INR. 250 (Individual) INR 500 (Institutions) Overseas: € 20 (Individuals) € 25 (Institutions)
Life Membership Charges: India: INR. 5000/- Overseas € 500 Email: [email protected]
Mobile: 09335555552
Editorial Correspondence: Dr. Jyotsna Sinha, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad -211004.
The authors whose articles are accepted for publication are required to obtain Life Membership of the Journal. Contribution may directly be transferred to the account of: The International Journal of Culture, Literature and Criticism
Account No. 718401011003169 Vijaya Bank, MNNIT, Teliarganj, Allahabad-211004 MICR Code: 211029004 IFSC CODE: VIJB0007184